Occidental Partridge

It's Valentine's Day evening and I have a blind date. I'm sitting in the lobby of a well-known London campus waiting to meet a first-year student who has just finished his day's lectures. OK, it's not really a date in that both parties expect the affair to be entirely platonic, and it's not really blind as we have met once before. But it's only when he spots and waves at me, and I take a second or so to register, that it strikes me I haven't seen his face before. For when we met, on a January demonstration opposite the Chinese Embassy on Portland Place, he was wearing a face mask. Having attended a number of pro-Hong Kong marches last year, the sight of masked East Asians had become very much a norm to me. So what compelled me to talk to this young man in particular? Namely, the fact he was also wearing the Chinese Olympic tracksuit, and holding a homemade banner saying "Love China. Love Democracy." My story-senses were tingling: a mainlander...

Against the advice of some of my better read friends, I will still from time to time reach for that  Evening Standard on the bus or London Underground. It exposes me to stories I would never usually click on when they drift through my social media feeds, to the juicy politically-charged gossip of the 'The Londoner' pages and, above all, can be a nice free ride with original high-quality thinkers who I'd usually have to pay for in The Economist or Standpoint (yes I mean Anne McElvoy). This week though it was Matthew D'Ancona whose Comment piece piqued my interest. This is unusual because D'Ancona, being among those Remainers with whom I parted company after the referendum, could for the last year at least be found using his Lebedev inches to preach Remoaner miserabilism with a consistency comparable to certain Anglican vicars I could name.  But it is time for us all to move on and in any case the subject matter was intriguing enough to draw me in: a eulogy-cum...

We're all fairly comfortable with the knowledge that our actions have consequences. But how often do we apply the same to our words? Certainly in our interpersonal relationships - whether romantic, familial, professional etc. - we are generally sure to mind our manners; anything less risks the fragile social harmony of an open-plan office space, or a tipsy Boxing Day.  But what about in the political sphere, and the impact our voiced and written thoughts may have on people we may never meet? Especially when those words aren't meant to bully or cause harm, but are simply the expression of sincere moral conscience? Actually it's something the UK plc office has been dealing with rather a lot lately: perhaps it's not the most sensitive example, but it's usually forgotten that a  now notorious comparison of niqab-wearers to letterboxes  was part of a defence of the very right to wear such things, and thus doubly belonging to a very British liberal tradition of stick...

So, we're out. How was your first week?  I voted (reluctantly) to Remain, but I told myself the day of the referendum that whatever the result, I would remain proud of this country. The fact that we were holding such a referendum - uniquely so far - was in itself something to take pride in. I'm happy to say that that pride has held out. It took some blows; for instance, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum when a minority of bigots felt emboldened to enact their savage prejudices toward immigrants; when Theresa May's government (to my shock and dismay) failed to immediately guarantee the continued rights of residence of 3.2m EU residents of the UK; and when Mrs May's government thought so little of this country that they were willing to sign her into a state of vassalage, in which we would take EU law but have no say in its making. But all societies have their share of racism, and the UK, it must be said, has a notably meagre one, at least as suggested by...

                     Yesterday I went to the excellent, if rather jading, Culture Under Attack exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. I learnt about instances of the wilful destruction of cultural heritage as an act of war or oppression, from the iconic such as the detonation of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan to the astoundingly unfamiliar such as the Nazi 'Baedeker Raids' aimed at bombing "every building in Brita in marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide" - a disturbing example of how one man's love of culture can be turned into a weapon against culture a few generations later (Baedeker's Great Britain was published 1897) Among the most poignant things was viewing the historic acts of wreckage as ever-more details emerge of the ongoing 'culture-cide' in the Xinjiang Uygur 'Autonomous Region'. CNN had broadcast footage that very morning concerning the mass destruction of Uighur Muslim cemeteries , including an int...

“There’s something in the culture of XR, in its DNA, that’s got all the good things of religion…in the community, in the bond, in the ethics and the care and the compassion that is amazing,” says Mark Ovland, who has – since we met – gone viral as one of the two Extinction Rebels who sparked commuter backlash by mounting a Tube train at Canning Town. This wasn’t the first time Mark crossed swords with Transport for London, being among the first to glue himself to the DLR during Extinction Rebellion’s first weeks of direct action in April. The press have described him as a ‘Buddhist teacher’ though as I found out, this isn’t strictly true. Although he has practiced Buddhism with great dedication for many years – even to the point of caring for his teacher when he fell ill, hardly leaving his side for three years – Mark has never considered himself a Buddhist. In common with many Westerners who adopt Eastern spiritual practice, he has drunk deeply from the cup of Buddhist wisdom and p...

Going by the attendance, you would never think Western Christianity was in any kind of trouble. I join a long queue snaking round the north face of St Paul's Cathedral and another twenty or so join behind me within minutes. Eventbrite has warned me that over 1,800 will be turning out to see the American clergyman who stole the show at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Miss Meghan Markle, and boy, have they turned up. The crowd is everything the Church of England would want to see at any of their churches: racially diverse, a mean age closer to 30 than 70, spiritually engaged (there is a monk behind me with long strawberry-blonde hair and a striking blue cassock) and - if I haven't made it clear already - big . Proportionately there must be a significant portion of this audience - congregation? - who are not regular churchgoers. But who can blame them? Archbishop Michael Curry's homily appeared like a bolt from the blue during last year's big ceremony, seizing his...