Which Newspaper helps you understand chocolategate?

Do you read a newspaper? It was quite a straightforward question at my ministry selection conference in 1979. One of the lay interviewers (the retired British Ambassador to Canada) asked it. I gave a true answer, which at that stage was the Daily Mail. That had been the paper I grew up with and, at the tender age of 24, I had never bothered to change. On Sundays my Dad had bought three papers - the Express, Times and Mirror and he spent Sunday mornings smoking and reading. I read the sports pages. Some of the guys I worked with bought the Sun or Mirror and I felt happily superior to them. The Times was for management.

Oh how things have changed. Politically and culturally I woke up. After ordination I changed to The Times, then The Independent shortly after its launch. In the mid 90s I became a Guardian reader but struggled to keep up given the amount of online material also coming my way. I embraced the iPaper and still do but tend to buy a Saturday Guardian or Sunday Observer. On Gozo for two weeks a year I read the Telegraph as the others take too long to arrive or sell out early. 

But to return to that selection conference question. Yes I read the iPaper and weekly Guardian but almost never on the day of publication, which, at minimum, gives me a good handle on their ability to prophesy. For daily news there is the BBC news app, a C of E media feed, a daily edigest and of course my Twitter feed with several news sites followed.

One of the skills required today is the ability to edit your input stream. For satisfactory balance you must not allow it to consist entirely of people with whom you agree.

But sometimes the entire stream goes bonkers, such as today when the whole of the UK internet seems to be discussing whether the National Trust had edited Easter out of chocolate and whether that mattered much. The Archbishop of York seems to have got it wrong, the C of E comms people have had to issue clarifying comments, the Prime Minister has got involved (which shows how trivial it is for she never has an immediate comment to make on serious issues) and Peter Ormerod, usually a beacon of sanity in a daft world, has managed to upset almost everybody by being right.

Watch and learn my friends. Watch and learn. And if being interviewed for the ordained ministry pitch your answer to the media question at a level the interviewer will understand. So sit by them at breakfast if you can.

Tomorrow. Is selling nails on Good Friday blasphemous?

The Happiest Days of My Life?

Richard Garner has been the Independent's, and more recently theipaper's education correspondent for many years. He has now retired and last Thursday wrote a fascinating retrospective on the changes upon which he has reported. I put the article on one side to consider again.

Find it here.

He notes some things of tremendous interest.

I had, for instance, forgotten that the abolition of corporal punishment in schools in 1986 was passed by only one vote. Mrs Thatcher, who would have voted against the measure, was delayed in traffic. Nice to know that traffic congestion isn't all bad. And it reminds us that Thatcher was not really a reformer at heart - she was a keep-it-as-it-is conservative in oh so many ways. Had she got there she would only have delayed the inevitable. Can't imagine the Major government ignoring such an issue, especially once they had their own mandate in 1992.

He records that the arrival of literacy and numeracy hours in the early days of the Blair government under David Blunkett's management was also a great drive upwards in standards. I reckon that the 1997 Labour Government (or New Labour as we must now remember not to call them again) had been sitting on its hands for so many years (eighteen in fact) that it did all its best work within eighteen months.

He applauds independent scrutiny of schools, noting in passing that the current chief schools inspector is proving too independent for Michael Gove's liking. The 'I thought we were friends' line ain't working. Academies will get just as much of a pasting under him as any LEA controlled school.

With some back-bench revolt afoot the current government, Garner says, may struggle to get their academisation legislation through.

And he ends with this:

'...treat teachers as professionals, not guinea pigs for constant change. After all, you wouldn't dictate to a brain surgeon how he or she should do their job, would you?'

Thanks Richard Garner. You have educated me.

Annoying Filler

I thought only one newspaper regularly did this sort of thing, but reading more than one organ on holiday I find it is more common than that.

A series of restaurants has opened, mainly south-east but that is where we are, where booking is not possible. You have to pitch up and queue. I'm pretty sure Pizza Express have had this policy for ages unless you are in a large party but we'll by-pass that.

So the Times did that thing of phoning the restaurant, pretending to be calling on behalf of various celebrities, to see if there was any latitude in the rules for pompous, over-paid, self-publicists who didn't do queues. Turns out there was.

Journals of truth using lies to expose hypocrisy. Annoys the hell out of me.

Although I did enjoy the answer to the request that Jeremy Clarkson be allowed to park outside the restaurant. 'This is a pedestrianised street.'

Quote Book Index 121-130

123. On a modern newspaper the astrology column tells you what is going to happen, the agony column tells you what to do when it does, and the news pages report the whole fiasco when you screw things up completely in spite of all the hard work everyone has been doing on your behalf. (Stephen Pile)

The Wire Revisited

theipaper has no web-site yet but can be followed on Twitter if you click the link. On Monday the paper shared a link to a site where a blogger has reimagined cult TV series The Wire as a Victorian Dickensian comic booklet series. What do you think? Find out here.

Research

For research purposes I've been reading the Sun every Monday. Topless Kelly, 19 from Daventry laments the lack of skills of the modern meteorologist suggesting that '...it's not as though we are back in the days of da Vinci's 15th-century gravimetric hygrometer to measure atmospheric humidity is it?'

Sorry Kelly. Got distracted. What you say?

I love the fact that the Sun doesn't take itself too seriously.

That said, is this a genuine letter to the problem page or was it written by a bored sub:

I recently joined a cookery course and made a fabulous souffle. However someone else made one that puffed up even higher than mine. She was so smug about it that I poked hers with a fork to deflate it and now she wouldn't speak to me. Should I try to patch things up?

The Sun's advice:

People can get very touchy when they're being creative ... Tell her to get stuffed - that's my culinary advice.

3 million people a day buy this. More read it than that.

Q and A

Newspapers and magazines seem more than usually full these days of the sort of 'profile' question and answer interviews that they obviously collect and keep available. Fillers, if you like.
I almost always read them. Occasionally an answer seems to manage to betray that the interviewee is a nice person, whilst giving stock answers to questions such as, 'What word or phrase do you overuse?' or 'How often do you have sex?'

Take this from actor Michael Sheen's grilling by Starters in Saturday's Guardian:

Question: Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Answer: Some anonymous Red Cross worker in a war-torn area no one will have heard of.

Now there is a person who is a good actor precisely because they understand the relative importance of actors. And a good person precisely because they know what is important in life. Being well enough known to do a profile interview isn't important. Thanks. Inspiring.

The Mercury

The Clevedon, Nailsea and Portishead Mercury to be precise. In a fine piece of headlining this week one story leads with 'Man guilty of bottling in field.' What did you think then? Illicit pickling? Kilners full of someone else's blackberries? No. The man in question hit someone over the head with a vodka bottle in a field.

Later they have cleverly trimmed a photo of an Indian Restaurant which provides contemporary Indian cuisine. Sadly it now only provides temporary Indian cuisine.

Finally there is the story of the world's saddest fly-tipper who was caught when not only was he spotted and had his registration plate reported but the rubbish included an envelope addressed to him. Gotcha. Community service here he comes.

Times Maths

'Did you know', said Peter, 'that 74,000 deer die on the roads of this country every year.'

'That sounds a bit high,' said Mark and I doing some quick maths. 'That's about 200 a day.'

'Said so in the Times,' said Peter.

Peter, very graciously, brought a copy of the Times' article round the next day. The headline is indeed, '74,000 deer die on roads'. Trouble is, this number is calculated by adding the number killed outright (7,000) to the number which die later (10,000).

Maths. It's so hard.

Still too many dead deer though. Drive carefully.

Who Are Us?

I used to get very upset (I've grown up a bit now) when people said the church shouldn't get involved in politics. Not because I necessarily disagreed with that completely but because it's such a sloppy sentence. Who did they mean? By and large, in the 1970s and 80s it meant, 'The clergy shouldn't get involved in party politics,' which is far more specific.

So today's big headline on the BBC news page is:

Church accused of abuse cover-up

Beneath that is a snippet from the story saying, 'The Church of England is accused of covering up child sex abuse carried out by a former choirmaster.'

The illustration is the pectoral cross on the breast of a bishop. Given that there are people who can recognise a football strip from a brief glimpse at the shirt collar I bet someone will tell us which bish it is.

But the suggestion therefore is that the church hierarchy (bishops) covered up. Reading the text of the story we discover that the hiearchy claim they dealt with the case as best they could given the knowledge and practice of the time. One bishop and one vicar, having received an allegation, spoke to the man involved and got him to leave his job. There is no criticism of this in the BBC report. The parents of one of the victims, who made the initial complaint also, presumably, chose not to report the matter to the police. Yet we don't get, 'Parents in abuse cover-up.'

Spokespeople for the Church of England quite rightly point out that current best practice is er, much better. Should it have been much better in the late 1980s when this, admitedly dreadful, abuse happened? It's borderline. At that time I recall having been on the most basic of training sessions on spotting and acting upon allegations of abuse, but this through CYFA Pathfinder Ventures (who run holidays for young people with volunteer leaders) and not the Dioceses of Southwell and Durham for which I worked at the time. I was a venture leader from 1985-2002 and this period saw an extreme increase in the requirements of leaders to understand and deal with potential allegations of abuse.

I also have a good friend who has been a professional in this area of work (working with disadvantaged, abused and excluded children) for many years so my personal knowledge in say, 1990, probably owed more to her than officialdom.

Today I have a small card on my desk with quick reference to best practice in child protection matters following a thorough, top-up training day a few weeks back by the Diocese of Bath and Wells.

My best guess/recollection is that the Dioceses of Southwell and Durham were not early adopters of best practice in these matters but neither were they last in. The CYFA Ventures team were early in.

I think 'Church accused of abuse cover-up' is sloppy given the many shades of meaning of 'church', the absence of such allegations in the story under that heading and the other people who must have, wittingly or unwittingly, colluded in such a cover-up were it to have taken place.

'Church' can mean a representative, many people, a building, a parish, a diocese, a denomination, and world-wide catholic. Let's try and be as clear as we can when speaking of it.

Seven

Travelling up to the Midlands on Sunday afternoon we realised we hadn't bought a Sunday paper. I think we were suffering from 243ishitis in which the sufferer has no idea what day of the week it is from Christmas Eve until the end of the first week of the year.

The petrol station at Cribbs Causeway mid-afternoon offered us no Observer or Independent on Sunday (first two choices) so we bought a Sunday Telegraph. Now the Telegraph has usually annoyed me on the odd occasions I have read it since discovering in about 1988 that reading the Daily Mail was the main cause of my need for anger management therapy. But Seven. Wow.

Seven is the weekly arts magazine insert with reviews of cinema, theatre, music and a few related articles plus the TV listings. It's quite breathtakingly brilliant and useful.

End of an Era

I grew up in a Daily Mail household with the Express, Times and Mirror around on a Sunday. When I left college in 1984 I thought I ought to read a 'proper' paper and started reading The Times.

In 1987, fed up of The Times' coverage of the General Election, I became an Independent reader. It has been an enjoyable relationship, not least in the period when Andrew Marr was editor and decided to put the best piece of writing on the front page regardless of the subject matter. Circulation fell but I often seem to support minority views.

Their photography has always been great, especially the moody black and whites. Their front pages imaginative and their posters, statistics and comment excellent. They led the way in tabloid-sizing the broadsheets.

Possibly because selling a house, changing a job and moving are concentration-sapping activities I have found the Indie hard to read recently and even dull.

So I have upped camp and moved to the Guardian. I have read it every Saturday anyway for the last couple of years and enjoyed it. This may be permanent. Apart from Johann Hari I can't think of a columnist I will really miss.

Church Times

I have started taking the Church Times again. The Church Times will forever be the sort of newspaper you take rather than buy.

We all act out of mixed motives but I can honestly say that the primary reason I resubscribed was the job adverts.

I had forgotten how much fun it was. Here's a sample from today. It is in the column called Out of the Question in which readers pose questions and other readers provide answers - a sort of ecclesiological magazine equivalent of a radio phone-in.

'Some time ago I obtained a pattern for a knitted version of the Last Supper. I have mislaid the pattern, and the website from which I ordered it seems to have closed down. Does anyone know where I can get one? - EL'

Dear friends, does this not raise even more questions for you?