The damning of incense

Charterhouse Chronicle Quentin de la BOdoyere
Jr Jim MeDaid, a Transport
Minister in heland, has warned us of the dangers of incense.
Jr Jim MeDaid, a Transport
Minister in heland, has warned us of the dangers of incense.
And he's right; it is potentially lethal. Many years ago when Midnight Mass was said in Fr O'Kane's sitting room in Edenbridge there was little space left around the altar.
My father was master of ceremonies and I was thurifer. Unfortunately in incensing the congregation I struck a parish worthy on the forehead. Oh, the shame! Had I known that I was also endangering him and others with carbon molecules I would have been repentant indeed.
However, if the blow had been fatal the eschatological outcome would have been good. Faced by long queues for confession Fr O'Kane would eventually look at his watch, order everyone to kneel down, and administer general absolution. At least my victim would have died in a state of grace.
Tam disturbed, but not surprised, to read in a Daily Telegraph poll that four outof five of us support the idea of identity cards, as proposed by the Government. Not surprised because a long life has taught me that human folly, inability to learn from experience and ignorance simply of the way the world
works is unfathomable.
Power is what turns politicians on. And they delude themselves that their motives arc purely to benefit the voting fodder. Power resides in information. What a gift to our masters to provide them with a complete data base, full of personal information, which can at the press of a button be correlated with dozens of other data bases! Electronically we can be tagged, trussed and delivered — neither kicking nor screaming — into their fond and oppressive control.
The advance is on several fronts: for instance, the right of the police not just to take but permanently to retain fingerprints and DNA from innocent people, and their recommendations that there should he a permanent national DNA data base.
Or the attempt by David Blunkett to extend to a ragbag of organisations, such as local authorities and the Food Standards Agency, the right to monitor private telecommunications. In the last instance, even Blunkett, who has a brain like a jumping bean, realised that he might have gone too far. However, even as I write, the Home Office is attempting to restore the bulk of his original proposals. His latest project for identity cards has been temporarily balked, but for pragmatic rather than principled reasons. It will be back.
Of course I know the, oh so sensible, arguments for identity cards: counteracting terrorism, unearthing drug barons, identifying illegal immigrants. And I
reject them because you and I know just
where they will, by tiny steps, lead. We will end with a potential police state in which the most intimate details of our private lives will be recorded and available.
Of course each advance will be accom
panied by assurances of proper usage. Nonsense. The misuse of official data is already occulting: confidential data bases leak like sieves when palms are crossed with silver..
Perhaps the most dull-witted, but dangerous argument is that the law-abiding should have nothing to fear. Leaving aside the fact that the ostensible targets of such legislation are just the ones who can find ways around it, do we really welcome a society in which we have no privacy perhaps even in the bedroom? Because that's where the arguments leads. Big Brother is no longer fictional speculation, he is already a sturdy adolescent, growing rapidly to full power.
Do not think that he will not use it. I deeply mistrust politicians and I deeply distrust bureaucrats. It is not that they arc more wicked than the rest of us but that they have the power and the inclination to delve into us all with sticky and corrupt fingers. Only the Almighty can be trusted to number the hairs of my head. I'd like to keep it that way
/have often wondered what it would be like to be a member of the opposite sex. I once even vaguely contemplated dressing up as a woman for a day to see whether or not I was treated differently. I abandoned the idea because I judged that my heard would give the game away, unless 1 confined myself to the local fairground. But I now have a new insight. Cystitis in an infection well known to women, but rare in men, except those over a certain age. And recently, being over a certain age, I had a severe attack, involving urgent hospital treatment and various procedures which I will not specify. The women, family and friends, did
not crow; on the contrary I received much sympathy and practical advice. And I needed it. I cannot remember ever experiencing such agonising and prolonged pain. Breaking my leg and having a quintuple heart bypass were a doddle by comparison.
So now I have deeper understanding of what womenfolk have to go through: what Shakespeare might have called the "urological proof'. It was a good learning experience, but, chaps, I wouldn't recommend it. It's no fun at all.
As a coda to the above — being, so to speak, caught short. I never had a chance to do my research. It's not that I want to second guess but that I want to know what questions to ask. It is also a way of discovering whether doctors really know their stuff. In this case my GP has been a heroine.
But I like to remain in control. And I shall endeavour to do so until senility overtakes me. Then I shall rely on my daughters whom we brought up to have a healthy scepticism about professional opinions.
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