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When I first went to India, 25 years ago, I was embarrassed by cycle rickshaws. I felt uneasy being transported by thin people much poorer than myself, especially as I watched the muscles of their calves straining to move the weight of their passengers. The whole thing emphasised inequality. Now cycle rickshaws are popular in central London as an amusing, green and almost nimble way of getting through the traffic. Recently I saw one with four teenage girls on board all screaming with delight and bantering with their driver (I imagine Health and Safety will soon stop it). And now one feels no unease at all. The physical situation is essentially the same — one thin young man exhausts himself pulling along mostly heavier people, but presumably he does not do it out of economic desperation. The embarrassment of difference is removed. Meanwhile, such is India’s economic success that I suspect many of the boys who struggled to pedal me up a hill are now garage proprietors grown fat.
From time to time, this column has reported the threats from TV Licensing that I have received for alleged licence evasion in my London flat. The main point of the stories has been that I do not have a television, but that the licensing authorities brush aside this possibility and assume one is a cheat. Things went quiet for some time, but I recently received the most menacing letter yet. From Paul Stanfield of Customer Services (who are the customers, and how does he serve them?), dated 8 October, it told me that if I did not respond by 23 October I could expect an investigation by the Enforcement Division: ‘The consequences of such an investigation can be serious.’ Unusually, this letter does admit the chance that ‘you do not use TV equipment at this address’, but says you must let them know and ‘We will arrange a visit to confirm the situation.’ Since I do not need the situation confirmed, I have not replied. Nor has the Enforcement Division turned up. As politicians annoyingly say when they wish to appear tough, bring it on.
Some hunting people, particularly those in the most rural areas, think that the best way to deal with the ban is to ignore it. The law is so unworkable, they say, that it scarcely matters. This is a mistake. There have now been several convictions under the Hunting Act — the Quantock Staghounds are the latest victims. This week, the wretched Ann Widdecombe held a meeting in the House of Commons in which she showed police officers and others a film about how the ban is, in her view, being flouted. Politics has only to change a bit for the police to turn nasty. If politics changes the other way, and there is a Conservative government (no Widdecombe, thank God: she is retiring), the promise of repeal must be cashed in straightaway.
Much as I enjoy Rupert Christiansen’s new collection of favourite hymns Once More with Feeling (Short Books), I must take issue with a point he makes about Newman’s ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’. The fifth stanza goes:
Oh generous love! that he, who smote,
In Man for man the foe,
The double agony in Man
For man should undergo;
Christiansen says that this is ‘an example of hymnal poetry in which the grammar and diction are so convoluted and compressed that the sense remains impenetrable’. Surely not. The ‘he’ (‘who smote’) is God. He smote Satan (‘the foe’) in ‘Man’ (Adam, referred to earlier in the hymn) on behalf of mankind. In the person of Jesus (the ‘second Adam’), God submitted himself to the ‘double agony’ — the agony in the garden and the agony of the Crucifixion (see stanza six, which continues the sentence begun in stanza five) — also on behalf of mankind. Compressed, yes, but not impenetrable. It is the neatest formulation of the doctrine of the Atonement.
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