An Unusual Post

In addition to an account of some of the more interesting and amusing aspects of the courier life, part of the raison d'être of this blog is to reveal some of the thoughts that also fill my life.  So, after the 'Unusual Week' already described here, I'd like to outline a couple of these from the week just finished. 

In the calm of a post-lay-in Saturday morning, I pondered the week's news from Israel, and found myself thinking about peace - what it means, and what prevents it.

Someone once said that true peace is far more than the absence of war, and it's my contention that the present situation in the middle east is the proof of that statement.  As I see it, the problems stretch back almost a hundred years to the end of the First World War when, with the Central Powers defeated, the world leaders had to decide how to deal with their lands.  While the Versailles Conference dealt with the fates of Germany and Austria-Hungary, the partition of the Ottoman Empire had been largely pre-determined during the war by a series of agreements, mainly involving Britain and France.  The empire was divided into a number of 'chunks' bounded by many straight lines drawn on the map.  It seems that little cognisance was taken of the many nations living there, and the areas in which they lived, such as the Kurds, whose homelands are famously spread across eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and into Iran.  Some parts, like Saudi Arabia, were given independence, while others like Syria and Palestine were occupied and governed under mandate from the League of Nations.

At this point I must stop the 'history lesson', for it's far more complicated than this brief note either can cover, or needs do to make my point.  Rather bizarrely, I compared peace to a chair placed on a carpet.  When sat on, the chair teetered from corner to corner, because the carpet had not been laid on the floor, but on the rubbish that had gathered on the floor before the need for carpet and chair had been determined.  How is this situation to be corrected?  One solution would be to remove the chair and, taking some offcuts of carpet, build up the corner that was too low, so that the chair could be replaced a little more evenly.  Perhaps a better solution would be to remove both chair and carpet, and even the surface of the rubbish before replacing them.

Common sense tells us that the 'proper' solution would be to clear the rubbish out of the way completely and place both carpet and chair on the floor.  However, removing the rubbish reveals a dirt floor that is itself uneven ... and so the analogy goes on.  The underlying question is, 'how far can a problem be stripped back to find and resolve the fundamental difficulty?'  While I'm sure you can see the parallels here with the successors to the Ottoman Empire, equally, I'm sure you would agree that the solution is far from simple.  Indeed, to peel back a century of history, like the carpet, and even out the floor, would be completely impossible - and I for one have no answers to this enigma.

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So I wondered about peace.  The other thing I want to share with you is a complete contrast, and I'll begin with a story, which you may have heard before.  It concerns a priest who was very fond of golf.  One sunny Sunday morning, Fr Ryan decided that it was such a lovely day he'd rather play golf than take Mass.  So he phoned a fellow priest, pleaded sickness, arranged for the other priest to take the service, and set off for the golf course.  As he teed up for the second hole, he was spotted from heaven by an alert angel, who reported him to St Peter.

'You'll never guess - I've just spotted Fr Ryan out on the golf course; didn't he call in sick?  What should we do about this?'

St Peter had the answer.  'Leave it to me,' he said.

On the fifth, Fr Ryan astounded himself and scored a hole in one.  The angel was puzzled, and said to St Peter, 'I thought you were going to sort Fr Ryan out.  He's just scored a hole in one!'  Wisdom was revealed in St Peter's reply.

'So, he'll be cock-a-hoop, but ... who's he going to tell?  That'll really pain him!'

And what has this story to do with a courier who has never touched a golf club in his life, and isn't likely to?  Simply this.  I enjoyed a very satisfying Twitter exchange on Friday morning (before being sent to Halesworth), but I can't tell my friends about it, because none of them speaks Welsh  - not that I do either, beyond a very few words.  So I'll get it off my chest by telling you, dear reader.

One of the many broadcasters that I follow on Twitter is the lady who does the morning travel reports on Radio 2, Lynn Bowles ... whom I know to be Welsh.  She had tweeted that, strangely, most of the people she had spoken to that morning were named Bob.  I decided to join in the conversation with the single comment, 'Bob dydd!'  and to my amazement I received a reply - proving, to my mind at least, that broadcasters are human after all - Lynn replied, 'Nice one, Brian.'

(For the benefit of non-Welsh-speaking readers, perhaps I should explain that 'bob dydd' means simply 'good day'.)

Here's hoping for a more normal week next week!