The Endless Chain Podcast

Back in the mists of time, the Brussels Shakespeare Society put on a play at a theatre in the Schaarbeek district of the town that was, at least then, known as the Scarabaeus . A scarab is an Egyptian good-luck charm, except in the case of this theatre. It is council-owned but was then leased out to a theatrical two-hander, the principal player in which was the wife, whose name was (not) Hippolyta...

Suppose we didn’t know why there are ructions at university campuses. Not suppose that they were having a food strike (which we did at school, and which I wrote about here ), but let’s suppose we just didn’t know what the trouble was. That we’d never heard of Israel, or Gaza, or sliced white bread. What, then, would you think about what’s happening at Yale, and Columbia, and elsewhere at this time...

Let me tell you something: every morning, I go outside to one of the three water butts I have positioned around my house that collect rainwater off the roof. I fill two watering cans and carry them inside to the downstairs loo. And, when I want to flush the loo, I fill the cistern with my rainwater. It saves water. In fact, rainwater collects beneath my driveway in a concrete structure holding 3,0...

A gobshite is a stupid and incompetent person. Pronounced gob -shahyt . Realpolitik is a 19th century notion conjured by Ludwig von Rochau, which is in widespread use in today’s world. Nowadays it’s taken to mean the politics of pragmatism: achieving the possible, what is realistic , rather than attaching to high-flown, and highfalutin, moralistic goals. Realpolitik contrasts with Idealpolitik. Ro...

“How do you know the Bible tells you the truth—because we have other religions to go by?” Thus a discussion host poses a question to a believer in God. The answer comes: “Because I pray about it.” Without wanting to be dogmatic, he is right. Here’s why I think he is. Belief is like many human emotions (if not all of them, actually—visceral). It springs from the heart. If it sprang from the head (a...

A killing spree. Madness. Crazy. Makes no sense. Unfathomable . The judgments we hear day in, day out, about acts that seem to fit such descriptions. Time and again, in order to comprehend someone’s acts, whether in politics or in the movies or in our employment relations, we’re told to follow the money , to the point that one can almost conclude that all our problems would be solved, if only we c...

It’s stunning news, isn’t it? The Milky Way’s biggest stellar black hole. And, wouldn’t you know it, it was there the whole time, just 2,000 light years away. It’s called BH3 and I suppose that “BH” means ... black hole. Because it’s black; and a hole. Celestial bodies get named after numbers, letters, Greek gods, famous scientists, famous politicians, famous anythings, because there are quite a l...

Some records are best not broken. Turkish Airlines flight 981 broke one by becoming the deadliest air crash to date, the date being Sunday, 3 March 1974. I can remember it, and it shocked me. It shocked the world. Paris Match asked whether the day had come to say “no” to jumbo jets. Their by-line is Le poids des mots, le choque des photos —the weight of the words, the shock of the pictures: they a...

Curtis Reeves and John Walters are both killers. Curtis shot a man dead at point-blank range in a cinema in Florida, and John shot a man dead on the forecourt of a petrol station in San Antonio, Texas. Curtis was tried on a charge of second-degree murder, and acquitted. John was never charged. Never arrested. He pulled out a gun in sight of a security camera, shot a man dead on a petrol station fo...

My father’s old 1930s encyclopaedia contains the following illustration and attendant description. There’s a common misconception that the caesarean operation for giving birth is named after Caesar, but this is incorrect. In fact, it is because the man himself was born thus that he was named Caesar, which means “cut”. The Book of Knowledge ’s description could also give rise to misconceptions: Cae...

All my life, it’s been good guys and bad guys. Just like in The Virginian : James Drury and Doug McClure were the good guys, the men from Shiloh. And they took all the bad guys to task. Drury might’ve had a black hat and a black shirt, but his horse was white as the driven snow. First we learned about concentration camps, which Germany invented to put Jews in. They gassed them there. Loads of them...

We gather here in this great hall of justice, in the Peace Palace. We are reminded of these simple words: peace through justice, peace through law. The General Assembly brought the question of Palestine before the court because our people are in jeopardy. The clarity of the law as it pertains to this question is only matched by the evidence of its continued breach by Israel. As we address you toda...

When Israel attended a peace conference in Brussels on 27 January 2024, they used part of the time available to them to show a presentation of a projected rail link from Israel to India. Just to remind you, here is a map of the area between Israel and India: The route would go through Syria or Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, perhaps also Saudi Arabia and/or Afghanistan. Looks unlikely? Of course it’...

“Love him or hate him, we all owe Snowden our thanks for forcing upon the nation an important debate. But the debate shouldn’t be about him. It should be about the gnawing questions his actions raised from the shadows.” Bernie Sanders, US Senator for the state of Vermont, on whistleblower Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden is a criminal. He’s been tried by American courts and found guilty under variou...

In his song L’Italia , Marco Masini sings, “È un paese, l’Italia, che governano loro”, which can be translated as Italy’s a land ruled by “them”. Masini sings of his homeland, but is it not something that we can say about every country? Famously, the US Constitution begins with the words We, the people , so America is not ruled by them , it is ruled by us (by which I mean the Americans ). Yet, the...

Every school playground supervisor knows—or thinks they know—that there are two sides to every argument. That of the party who allegedly struck out; and that of the party that was allegedly struck. It’s a philosophy that I’ve long since adhered to: that, even though one might be persuaded by hearing just one side to a story, one should never be resistant to hearing the other. However, what if ther...

In a crowded bus, giving up your seat for someone else does not reduce the number of people who are standing; nor does it increase the number of people who are sitting. So, why would you do it? The reasons seem obvious: if a young, fit person gives up their seat to someone who is disabled, elderly, pregnant. In Paris, the rule has been that priority is granted to mutilés de guerre , the war-wounde...

The wind may blaw, the cock may craw, The rain may rain and the snaw may snaw, But ye winna’ frichten Jock McGraw, The stoutest man in the Forty-Twa’ The wind is blowing and, up in Alba , there’s even snow. Rain there is a plenty, but, Forty-Twa’ or no, is Jock McGraw afeared of Gerrit’s terrible weather? Pledges and statements are fine. But many are backtracking on the Paris commitment, and, Kyot...

This year, I attended, having received two invitations to do so, a meeting that was held at the house of someone I know. We had socialised before and I had been a guest at his home before. However, I knew that I had no great need to be at this meeting and, in fact, no entitlement. One might regard the invitations as an extension of “come one, come all” hospitality but I knew that the auspices unde...

When they went to West Africa, they brought with them their ships; they brought their languages and, Dr Livingstone , I presume they brought their fine explorers. They brought their linguists and their cartographers, their spades and their drills, their craftsmen and their architects; they built cities and citadels, and then mapped out the creeks and the hinterland of the luscious empires that the...

Believers in God, in Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, cite the Bible as the source for their belief and yet only two of the four gospels dwell in any manner on the circumstances surrounding the Nativity. Some might regard that as surprising, given the biological miracle that Jesus’s birth entailed (the immaculate conception), along with at least five apparitions of angels in dreams (to Joseph, asking hi...

Streaming means now something different from what it meant when I was at school. Fifty years ago. Then, it meant sorting wheat from chaff , or boys from … other boys . I was at a boys’ school and, in my year, the intake was large enough to have three parallel classes, or forms we called them. My older brothers had progressed through 1 to 5A and 1 to 5α, although by our eras they no longer taught G...

The entire metaphysical, spiritual and theological aspects aside, nothing changes perspectives quite like death. Whether it’s your own or that of a close friend or member of the family. Last week, I wrote to a friend to ask whether he thought it was advisable to take up a pen-friendship with a Texas convict who is on death row. In his considered and considerate reply, he raised one especially inte...

From my essay "Eyes of Needles": “In God’s world, property has no value. It simply exists, but no one could tell you that a fish is worth less than a tree if there weren’t markets there to tell you what fish cost and what wood costs. There are no markets in Heaven. So, what is the benefit in religious terms of a gift of gold to a baby, for a religion that places no value on gold as a means of enri...

Een NL-versie van deze tekst is hier verder beneden te lezen. Readers who have been with me on this journey for some time may have seen the following sentiments before, but in a different form. The change of form is due to a change in the question that has been put to me, on this occasion from Top Shelf Theology . If a refreshed approach to God, spirituality, theology and “what’s it all about?” en...