Is Time Real?
15 - 19
Dec.
Erroneously shown as a
Nov
diary entry previously. Ian
We could give a respectable account of our year
by simply posting a diary of all of our animal sightings. Last Thursday evening
we went to see penguins. While we were waiting for the light to fail we had
dinner at a restaurant that was recommended to us at the ugly coastal town of
Ulverstone. Reinforcing our sense that we've stepped back in time, it was a
meal served from a kitchen that had no apparent fear of being shamed by the
verdict of discriminating dining guides: Paula's steak pie, for example,
contained a piece of solid plastic; my Asian spicy seafood broth was no laksa
and came with a side of limp broccoli and carrots, served in a metal
dish.
Someone here asked me whether Tasmania didn't remind me of England and I replied, Yes, but of England from twenty years ago. Even as the words left my lips I knew that I was way off: Tasmania has nothing to do with England in the Eighties but rather of an England I never knew from 50 or 100 years ago. To come to Tasmania is to step into a bucolic fantasy. There are very few people and even fewer cars. In England I've often looked at an old house and thought how lovely it must have been when it was built and the road from which I'm viewing it didn't have hundreds of people like me speeding along it in our cars. In Tasmania you see these idyllic houses everywhere: there has been no explosion of people and traffic, and it wouldn't occur to anyone to cite a house anywhere other than along one of the normal roads: there aren't yet roads for travel and separate residential lanes for suburban homes. If you live on the main route from, say, Paradise to Sheffield you stand more chance of seeing an echidna on the road than a lorry.
Driving along I have tuned into the local radio a couple of times. The first time the DJ, an Irishman called Dave, was encouraging a very drunk caller to pile one indecent slander (I presume) upon another regarding what the two of them had got up to one drunken night in the past. The exchange was underway when I started my journey and was still going strong at the end of it. The next time I tuned in we were all in the car together; when I turned on the radio the same DJ was taking calls and I was a little apprehensive about suitability for the girls. On the first call Dave tried to chat up the caller and then flirted with her mother after she handed over the phone. And he asked the next caller for a date too, although she replied that her boyfriend was with her and that she'd only called in because she was bored. As I listened to all of this the essential key of truth struck: they all know each other!
After our dinner in Ulverstone the girls played for a while on the swings in the small town of Penguin; for surreal effect a giant Penguin made from some sort of concrete compound stood next to the park looking out over the shops. When the gloaming set in we drove out to a place we'd read about near Penguin where you're guided around the coastline to see the fairy penguins swim in from the sea. This was another Tasmanian tourist experience. We'd tried to phone ahead to book but no one answered and there was no ansaphone. Somehow we determined where the place was, but drove past it twice before we found it; even when we had directions to precisely where it was and we were right by it on the road it was not easy to find the track that we needed. And a Private Property sign warned us away. Even when we arrived at the house from which the tours were run all we found was an unpromising locked garage door. Later the guy who ran the place complained that despite giving information to the local Tourist Office he wasn't getting much custom.
Which is a shame. On the night that we went there was one other family of four who, with us, made up the party. They were Aussies from Brisbane who had come over to Tasmania with the intention of "doing" it in the single week that he could get off work.
As the last light of the evening faded the old guy who ran the place led us down to the beach. We sat on makeshift wooden benches and waited and then watched as the little penguins swam from the sea, hopped onto the rocks and then swam up to the beach and waddled up to their nests. They're very cute. As they emerge from the sea they only look about 20 cm tall, but in reality they're probably a foot or so in height. They proceeded comically, gathering behind intermediate rocks and then rushing along in groups of around half a dozen. They seemed not to mind as the guy picked them out with a powerful red spotlight. We sat and watched for around 40 minutes and then he led us around their nesting grounds up to his house, which is octagonal with floor-to-ceiling picture windows looking panoramically out over the shore. Penguins were nesting right up to the house and even under the porch.
There's a clearing of lawn close to the front of the house, which is apparently completely fringed with penguins most years. This year we had to look for individuals, though they were not very hard to find, especially since they squawk so loudly. The relative dearth of penguins this year was ascribed to the bad weather: apparently the heavy showers that have attended us most days are usually over well before now. The guy was not at all chatty but had answers to all of our questions, and I came to find him likeable: he embodied all that appeals to me in the anti-Disney tone of the place, and of Tasmania at large. We were more than happy to give him the few quid that he charged and Paula took some of his fliers and gave them to John to put in the rack at Silver Ridge.
You may recall from an earlier blog that we saw a Tasmanian devil on a beach eating a wombat. People here tell us that we were lucky, and that few Tasmanians see devils in the wild. A few nights later we plugged the TV back in and saw on the local news that several whales had flopped out and stranded themselves on the very same beach; we thought about getting in the car and driving along, but it somehow seemed in poor taste. It reminded me, actually, of many years ago when the first news of the Handsworth riots came through and one of my friends picked me up and drove me as close to the scene as he could negotiate through the police cordons. They've had race riots in Sydney this week, and I've been relieved to hear that pretty much everyone (including the chap here at the filling station) is appalled by them. On the news the premier of New South Wales launched into a grandiloquent statement that crescendoed with "We will not have our reputation damaged..." and ended in good Aussie style, "... by these ratbags". More power to him.
It wasn't only the whales that we missed. We've seen many echidnas and in our last couple of days in Tassie we realised that we had a good shot at getting a sighting in the wild of the world's only other monotreme (being a mammal that lays eggs): the platypus. We read about a promising place over on the north coast and drove over there. While the rain hammered down once more we enjoyed the mixed pleasures of a pre-war-style tea room: decorated with any amount of frills and soft furnishings, we had nice freshly-baked scones served with home-made jam, and inedible home-made lemon slice. We were the only people there but nonetheless my sense was that the old dear lead us away from what she felt were the best seats. When the rain stopped we walked around the "English-style" gardens (complete with quaint music and gnomes arranged outside a little Wendy house); as Paula led the way out the lady held me back and insisted that we pay her directly, seemingly not trusting us to leave our £4 in the honesty box outside.
The river bank that we visited to hunt for platypuses was beautiful. A brown river flowed through woodland, with reed beds in the shallows and sedge banks. There was plenty of bird life there and it was a delightful place to pass an idle hour. But we didn't see any platypuses. The next evening we tried a river bank closer to home where we'd been tipped off that we might catch a sighting in the early evening. Shortly after we arrived we met another family of four who had come down with their fishing rods after trout. At times over the past fortnight, and this was another of them, I've felt as if I've fallen asleep and awoken as a minor character in Swallows and Amazons. The family confirmed that they see platypuses there quite frequently, but this was not one of those lucky nights. But we've seen far more pademelons, Bennett's wallabies, wombats, possums and kookaburras than you'd ever imagine (not to mention the dozens of fairy penguins), and we're pleased with that.
We've also seized our nature opportunities at the retreat. Heidi, Zoe and I had one more visit to the possum station the other night, just alone with John this time, and the girls were pleased to have a final chance to feed slices of apple to Cheeky and her child (gender unknown), Bob. And Zoe and I had a short (one hour) walk through the rain forest on the edge of the property. This threatened to offer more nature contact than we wanted. The paths was more conceptual than physical and we were frequently pushing under, over and through trees that grew across what we believed to be the route alongside a creek. Trees and bushes brushed against us everywhere and at one spot I walked full face into one spider web that covered my face; in Aus you have to remember to be worried about these things. I was actually more concerned about snakes since the rotting logs we frequently had to clamber over and the damp, close woodland seemed like text-book resting places for the three lethal indigenous species.
Our most interesting encounter, fortunately, was with the trees. Apart from the sheer size of some of them, especially some of the fallen trunks, they have intrinsic interest. The stringy-bark tree, for example, has the noteworthy adaptive strategy of shedding its bark that catches alight easily, while the trunks are exceptionally resistant to fire, enabling them to survive and prosper as the surrounding land is burned away.
On Saturday we left Silver Ridge and motored down to Port Arthur, which is on the other side of the island, near to Hobart. Port Arthur is famous for its penal settlement, which was active from 1830 to 1877. Convicts who had been transported from England and then re-offended in the colony were sent here, and I'd read about it in English Passengers. It's one of the heaviest tourists spots in Tasmania and as a busy tourist destination it's very well done. For thirty-odd quid the four of us got a boat tour round the harbour, an explanatory walking tour of the site and a ghost tour at night. More than anything, it's a very pleasant place just to mill around. In conjunction with a night at the lodge next door, which had just been refurbished and was very un-Tasmanian in its understated chic decor, a ticket to Port Arthur is a great way to pass the two days that the ticket price covers. I'm not so sure about the ghost tour, though. We felt that it may have been better if they'd used the frisson of the night to spice up a life-of-a-prisoner tour: informative though it was, Paula and the girls seemed to get the impression that a stretch on Port Arthur was no worse than an unrequested sabbatical at Butlins. The ghost tour lasted 90 minutes; three times the guide made loud and sudden noises to set pulses racing. I admired the guide in the same way that I admire a good preacher - to be able to turn up with such regularity and give a sincere show of deep emotion and conviction is an impressive ability. She even managed to convey that it was unusual not to see a ghost, and that we were unlucky. But objectively it was lame - at one point she even tried to persuade us that it was spooky that only one of the windows in a particular Victorian frontage rattled ("I've even put card in the frame and it still rattles!").
She seemed to working a tough crowd and so when she asked for a hardened sceptic I volunteered and got to be the rear lantern-bearer. Paula noted the irony that I was presumably one of the few people present to have recently seen a ghost.
This morning we returned to Hobart and flew back to Melbourne to stay once more with Nat and Brett, which by now feels like coming home. Flying to Melbourne from Tassie is (like spending a year with the girls but in a more immediate way) a form of time travel. Tasmania reminded me of the film Bhaji on the Beach in which a group of ageing Indian women are castigated by their younger British-born family for being locked in the past: by moving to England they locked themselves within the India of their youth and became blind to how India itself moved on. I like Tasmania and guess that our next trip to Aus will go something like England -> Melbourne (4 days) -> Tasmania (10 days) -> Sydney (3 days) -> England, scaled for the time available.
While there I finished What we Believe but cannot Prove. A couple of the writers assert that over the past three decades kids in America have become more intelligent but less socially and emotionally able, and less happy. They ascribe the bad side of this to video games and so forth; I wonder if it isn't more directly a consequence of population explosion and the compression of people in towns and countries. This is testable (come to Tassie) and I'd be interested to see where the facts point. Another writer in the same book, perhaps inspired by a stay here, argued that time is an illusion or an approximation, a rhetorical device perhaps, and that someday physics will have a better description of the world in which time doesn't feature. Sounds like the lament of a man who misses a lot of trains.
I've been enjoying bursting through so many unproven ideas in this book. One, which I find shockingly logical, is by an physicist who argues that (1) the universe is finite in age; (2) there are good grounds for believing that the universe is infinite in size; (3) the last point implies that there are infinitely many regions having the (finite) size of the observable universe; (4) quantum physics (presumably as some consequence of discretization that I don't understand) implies that each such region can, over the finite life of the universe, have only finitely many "histories"; (5) when you stick the last two points together, every history must play out somewhere. So, the author concludes, if you didn't like the last election don't worry because in a different region of the universe the other side won. You should know that some of the brightest people in the world take these ideas seriously. It's been a couple of decades since I studied quantum mechanics and relativity at university and I find myself unable to see how the universe started with the big bang and can be finite in age yet infinite in size: of the four cells in the infinite/finite x age/size quadrant this seems like the only one that must be impossible - when/how could spatial infinity arise? If it makes sense to you let me know. Expect more on this in future.
Having finished that book I'm moving on to the comfort of a book that I'm confident will repeat views that I already hold - Heresies by John Gray.
At the airport I also picked up New Scientist, and learned that there is now a computer program that can quite accurately predict the box office take of movies from nine measurable input parameters. What struck me about these was that none of them captured plot, characterisation, directorial skill, acting performance or cinematography. Expect more on this, too.
I'm going to finish by wishing you all a Happy Christmas since I don't know when I'll next post and when you'll next sign on. In the USA it seems to be considered culturally insensitive to wish people Merry Christmas at Christmas time. I find this hard to accept for two contradictory reasons: first, it seems wrong to me that a particular religious group is not free to celebrate its important festivals, given that they're no threat to others; second, Christmas is and always has been a pagan festival open to those of any faith or none. Even reading the recent rantings of the religious right in the US, with their Just Say Christmas wrist bands, hasn't changed my view on this. Typically and tiresomely, they see this as a "War" on Christmas, and war is something that they're peculiarly able to ferret out anywhere and don't seem able to get enough of. I read that the Happy Holidays denial of Christmas, this being America, was commercially inspired, with large stores fearing that causing offence to non-Christian shoppers may damage sales. To me this reticence to say the C word is pragmatism or political correctness gone mad - although, quoting What we Believe... once more, I do accept that the attitudes of a reasonable person might be different in a country in which 22% of the population are certain that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead within the next 50 years and a further 22% believe it to be highly likely.
From Australia, and in spirit from the UK, where we're not so burdened by believing our beliefs: Merry Christmas!!
Ian
Someone here asked me whether Tasmania didn't remind me of England and I replied, Yes, but of England from twenty years ago. Even as the words left my lips I knew that I was way off: Tasmania has nothing to do with England in the Eighties but rather of an England I never knew from 50 or 100 years ago. To come to Tasmania is to step into a bucolic fantasy. There are very few people and even fewer cars. In England I've often looked at an old house and thought how lovely it must have been when it was built and the road from which I'm viewing it didn't have hundreds of people like me speeding along it in our cars. In Tasmania you see these idyllic houses everywhere: there has been no explosion of people and traffic, and it wouldn't occur to anyone to cite a house anywhere other than along one of the normal roads: there aren't yet roads for travel and separate residential lanes for suburban homes. If you live on the main route from, say, Paradise to Sheffield you stand more chance of seeing an echidna on the road than a lorry.
Driving along I have tuned into the local radio a couple of times. The first time the DJ, an Irishman called Dave, was encouraging a very drunk caller to pile one indecent slander (I presume) upon another regarding what the two of them had got up to one drunken night in the past. The exchange was underway when I started my journey and was still going strong at the end of it. The next time I tuned in we were all in the car together; when I turned on the radio the same DJ was taking calls and I was a little apprehensive about suitability for the girls. On the first call Dave tried to chat up the caller and then flirted with her mother after she handed over the phone. And he asked the next caller for a date too, although she replied that her boyfriend was with her and that she'd only called in because she was bored. As I listened to all of this the essential key of truth struck: they all know each other!
After our dinner in Ulverstone the girls played for a while on the swings in the small town of Penguin; for surreal effect a giant Penguin made from some sort of concrete compound stood next to the park looking out over the shops. When the gloaming set in we drove out to a place we'd read about near Penguin where you're guided around the coastline to see the fairy penguins swim in from the sea. This was another Tasmanian tourist experience. We'd tried to phone ahead to book but no one answered and there was no ansaphone. Somehow we determined where the place was, but drove past it twice before we found it; even when we had directions to precisely where it was and we were right by it on the road it was not easy to find the track that we needed. And a Private Property sign warned us away. Even when we arrived at the house from which the tours were run all we found was an unpromising locked garage door. Later the guy who ran the place complained that despite giving information to the local Tourist Office he wasn't getting much custom.
Which is a shame. On the night that we went there was one other family of four who, with us, made up the party. They were Aussies from Brisbane who had come over to Tasmania with the intention of "doing" it in the single week that he could get off work.
As the last light of the evening faded the old guy who ran the place led us down to the beach. We sat on makeshift wooden benches and waited and then watched as the little penguins swam from the sea, hopped onto the rocks and then swam up to the beach and waddled up to their nests. They're very cute. As they emerge from the sea they only look about 20 cm tall, but in reality they're probably a foot or so in height. They proceeded comically, gathering behind intermediate rocks and then rushing along in groups of around half a dozen. They seemed not to mind as the guy picked them out with a powerful red spotlight. We sat and watched for around 40 minutes and then he led us around their nesting grounds up to his house, which is octagonal with floor-to-ceiling picture windows looking panoramically out over the shore. Penguins were nesting right up to the house and even under the porch.
There's a clearing of lawn close to the front of the house, which is apparently completely fringed with penguins most years. This year we had to look for individuals, though they were not very hard to find, especially since they squawk so loudly. The relative dearth of penguins this year was ascribed to the bad weather: apparently the heavy showers that have attended us most days are usually over well before now. The guy was not at all chatty but had answers to all of our questions, and I came to find him likeable: he embodied all that appeals to me in the anti-Disney tone of the place, and of Tasmania at large. We were more than happy to give him the few quid that he charged and Paula took some of his fliers and gave them to John to put in the rack at Silver Ridge.
You may recall from an earlier blog that we saw a Tasmanian devil on a beach eating a wombat. People here tell us that we were lucky, and that few Tasmanians see devils in the wild. A few nights later we plugged the TV back in and saw on the local news that several whales had flopped out and stranded themselves on the very same beach; we thought about getting in the car and driving along, but it somehow seemed in poor taste. It reminded me, actually, of many years ago when the first news of the Handsworth riots came through and one of my friends picked me up and drove me as close to the scene as he could negotiate through the police cordons. They've had race riots in Sydney this week, and I've been relieved to hear that pretty much everyone (including the chap here at the filling station) is appalled by them. On the news the premier of New South Wales launched into a grandiloquent statement that crescendoed with "We will not have our reputation damaged..." and ended in good Aussie style, "... by these ratbags". More power to him.
It wasn't only the whales that we missed. We've seen many echidnas and in our last couple of days in Tassie we realised that we had a good shot at getting a sighting in the wild of the world's only other monotreme (being a mammal that lays eggs): the platypus. We read about a promising place over on the north coast and drove over there. While the rain hammered down once more we enjoyed the mixed pleasures of a pre-war-style tea room: decorated with any amount of frills and soft furnishings, we had nice freshly-baked scones served with home-made jam, and inedible home-made lemon slice. We were the only people there but nonetheless my sense was that the old dear lead us away from what she felt were the best seats. When the rain stopped we walked around the "English-style" gardens (complete with quaint music and gnomes arranged outside a little Wendy house); as Paula led the way out the lady held me back and insisted that we pay her directly, seemingly not trusting us to leave our £4 in the honesty box outside.
The river bank that we visited to hunt for platypuses was beautiful. A brown river flowed through woodland, with reed beds in the shallows and sedge banks. There was plenty of bird life there and it was a delightful place to pass an idle hour. But we didn't see any platypuses. The next evening we tried a river bank closer to home where we'd been tipped off that we might catch a sighting in the early evening. Shortly after we arrived we met another family of four who had come down with their fishing rods after trout. At times over the past fortnight, and this was another of them, I've felt as if I've fallen asleep and awoken as a minor character in Swallows and Amazons. The family confirmed that they see platypuses there quite frequently, but this was not one of those lucky nights. But we've seen far more pademelons, Bennett's wallabies, wombats, possums and kookaburras than you'd ever imagine (not to mention the dozens of fairy penguins), and we're pleased with that.
We've also seized our nature opportunities at the retreat. Heidi, Zoe and I had one more visit to the possum station the other night, just alone with John this time, and the girls were pleased to have a final chance to feed slices of apple to Cheeky and her child (gender unknown), Bob. And Zoe and I had a short (one hour) walk through the rain forest on the edge of the property. This threatened to offer more nature contact than we wanted. The paths was more conceptual than physical and we were frequently pushing under, over and through trees that grew across what we believed to be the route alongside a creek. Trees and bushes brushed against us everywhere and at one spot I walked full face into one spider web that covered my face; in Aus you have to remember to be worried about these things. I was actually more concerned about snakes since the rotting logs we frequently had to clamber over and the damp, close woodland seemed like text-book resting places for the three lethal indigenous species.
Our most interesting encounter, fortunately, was with the trees. Apart from the sheer size of some of them, especially some of the fallen trunks, they have intrinsic interest. The stringy-bark tree, for example, has the noteworthy adaptive strategy of shedding its bark that catches alight easily, while the trunks are exceptionally resistant to fire, enabling them to survive and prosper as the surrounding land is burned away.
On Saturday we left Silver Ridge and motored down to Port Arthur, which is on the other side of the island, near to Hobart. Port Arthur is famous for its penal settlement, which was active from 1830 to 1877. Convicts who had been transported from England and then re-offended in the colony were sent here, and I'd read about it in English Passengers. It's one of the heaviest tourists spots in Tasmania and as a busy tourist destination it's very well done. For thirty-odd quid the four of us got a boat tour round the harbour, an explanatory walking tour of the site and a ghost tour at night. More than anything, it's a very pleasant place just to mill around. In conjunction with a night at the lodge next door, which had just been refurbished and was very un-Tasmanian in its understated chic decor, a ticket to Port Arthur is a great way to pass the two days that the ticket price covers. I'm not so sure about the ghost tour, though. We felt that it may have been better if they'd used the frisson of the night to spice up a life-of-a-prisoner tour: informative though it was, Paula and the girls seemed to get the impression that a stretch on Port Arthur was no worse than an unrequested sabbatical at Butlins. The ghost tour lasted 90 minutes; three times the guide made loud and sudden noises to set pulses racing. I admired the guide in the same way that I admire a good preacher - to be able to turn up with such regularity and give a sincere show of deep emotion and conviction is an impressive ability. She even managed to convey that it was unusual not to see a ghost, and that we were unlucky. But objectively it was lame - at one point she even tried to persuade us that it was spooky that only one of the windows in a particular Victorian frontage rattled ("I've even put card in the frame and it still rattles!").
She seemed to working a tough crowd and so when she asked for a hardened sceptic I volunteered and got to be the rear lantern-bearer. Paula noted the irony that I was presumably one of the few people present to have recently seen a ghost.
This morning we returned to Hobart and flew back to Melbourne to stay once more with Nat and Brett, which by now feels like coming home. Flying to Melbourne from Tassie is (like spending a year with the girls but in a more immediate way) a form of time travel. Tasmania reminded me of the film Bhaji on the Beach in which a group of ageing Indian women are castigated by their younger British-born family for being locked in the past: by moving to England they locked themselves within the India of their youth and became blind to how India itself moved on. I like Tasmania and guess that our next trip to Aus will go something like England -> Melbourne (4 days) -> Tasmania (10 days) -> Sydney (3 days) -> England, scaled for the time available.
While there I finished What we Believe but cannot Prove. A couple of the writers assert that over the past three decades kids in America have become more intelligent but less socially and emotionally able, and less happy. They ascribe the bad side of this to video games and so forth; I wonder if it isn't more directly a consequence of population explosion and the compression of people in towns and countries. This is testable (come to Tassie) and I'd be interested to see where the facts point. Another writer in the same book, perhaps inspired by a stay here, argued that time is an illusion or an approximation, a rhetorical device perhaps, and that someday physics will have a better description of the world in which time doesn't feature. Sounds like the lament of a man who misses a lot of trains.
I've been enjoying bursting through so many unproven ideas in this book. One, which I find shockingly logical, is by an physicist who argues that (1) the universe is finite in age; (2) there are good grounds for believing that the universe is infinite in size; (3) the last point implies that there are infinitely many regions having the (finite) size of the observable universe; (4) quantum physics (presumably as some consequence of discretization that I don't understand) implies that each such region can, over the finite life of the universe, have only finitely many "histories"; (5) when you stick the last two points together, every history must play out somewhere. So, the author concludes, if you didn't like the last election don't worry because in a different region of the universe the other side won. You should know that some of the brightest people in the world take these ideas seriously. It's been a couple of decades since I studied quantum mechanics and relativity at university and I find myself unable to see how the universe started with the big bang and can be finite in age yet infinite in size: of the four cells in the infinite/finite x age/size quadrant this seems like the only one that must be impossible - when/how could spatial infinity arise? If it makes sense to you let me know. Expect more on this in future.
Having finished that book I'm moving on to the comfort of a book that I'm confident will repeat views that I already hold - Heresies by John Gray.
At the airport I also picked up New Scientist, and learned that there is now a computer program that can quite accurately predict the box office take of movies from nine measurable input parameters. What struck me about these was that none of them captured plot, characterisation, directorial skill, acting performance or cinematography. Expect more on this, too.
I'm going to finish by wishing you all a Happy Christmas since I don't know when I'll next post and when you'll next sign on. In the USA it seems to be considered culturally insensitive to wish people Merry Christmas at Christmas time. I find this hard to accept for two contradictory reasons: first, it seems wrong to me that a particular religious group is not free to celebrate its important festivals, given that they're no threat to others; second, Christmas is and always has been a pagan festival open to those of any faith or none. Even reading the recent rantings of the religious right in the US, with their Just Say Christmas wrist bands, hasn't changed my view on this. Typically and tiresomely, they see this as a "War" on Christmas, and war is something that they're peculiarly able to ferret out anywhere and don't seem able to get enough of. I read that the Happy Holidays denial of Christmas, this being America, was commercially inspired, with large stores fearing that causing offence to non-Christian shoppers may damage sales. To me this reticence to say the C word is pragmatism or political correctness gone mad - although, quoting What we Believe... once more, I do accept that the attitudes of a reasonable person might be different in a country in which 22% of the population are certain that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead within the next 50 years and a further 22% believe it to be highly likely.
From Australia, and in spirit from the UK, where we're not so burdened by believing our beliefs: Merry Christmas!!
Ian
Posted: Mon - December 19, 2005 at 05:30 PM
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Published On: Dec 26, 2005 07:02 PM
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Published On: Dec 26, 2005 07:02 PM