Movies in Reading

Dear Stan,

I loved your perceptive review of "The Illusionist". (see Stan's Movie Blog.) I was enthralled by this unusual movie when I saw it in the cinema and I have just received my DVD from Amazon.co.uk - hot from its much delayed UK release. Neil Burger's informative commentary, the "making-of" featurette and every review I have seen somehow ignore the elephant in the living room - the Eisenheim character's Jewishness. His real name is Abramowitz; the subtext of the alien outsider and his potential subversiveness runs throughout the story. The theme of rebellion against the corrupt and dictatorial regime bubbles to the surface on several occasions: the talk of a "spiritual revolution" inspired by spiritualism, Eisenheim's power over the agitated crowd outside the theatre, the scene where the ghost of the murdered Duchess Sophie apparently appears on stage before the suspicious audience - who explicitly accuse the Crown Prince of her murder. The suspect patriotism of Jewish communities throughout Europe was a sore point; this story is set around the time of the Dreyfus affair in France, and after the rise of socialist and communist movements inspired by the Jew Karl Marx. A few years later, a penniless vagrant in Vienna called Adolph Hitler had his first education in hatred - partly from local anti-semitic politicians and partly from his reaction to the visibly different observant Jews in the city.

Last week I saw a film with a most unexpected spiritual subtheme - "La vie en rose", the biopic about Edith Piaf. As a biography, the film is a masterpiece of evasion. It entirely omits her career in WW2 - an unforgetable period for any French person of her generation. The stories of her singing for senior German officers and entertaining Gestapo officers in her apartment above a bordello obviously wouldn't comfortably fit into the picture of the plucky French icon. But it does put repeated emphasis on her devotion to that most French of saints, St Therese of Lisieux, patron of your local basilica on 12 Mile Road (Shrine of the Little Flower -- see Stan's article on Mass Dimension for a description and pictures of this unique church), and shows her totally confused but sincere spirituality, along with her alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity, etc. The movie was shown in one of our local multiplexes, the Showcase on the east side of Reading, a rare honour for any foreign language film. Obviously the managers thought that there are enough English people "d'un certain age" who would want to see a Piaf movie. Or it might be desperation at the sight of another summer of Hollywood sequels - Shrek 3, Die Hard 4, Evan Almighty ( may Bruce Deliver Us!). Perhaps they thought that any remotely different or unusual film might attract filmgoers turned off by mainstream dross.

Unfortunately, the Showcase plainly does not employ the sharpest knives in the drawer. The only reason anyone in the Reading area is out of work is if you don't want a job. So any business which offers unsocial hours and low pay is going to find itself choosing from the near-unemployable of the English workforce ( 20% of our school-leavers are functionally illiterate and innumerate) or from the huge number of recently arrived East European immigrants who have an IQ above room temperature and a terrific work ethic, but limited English. This leads to much entertainment in local eating places. At a wedding reception last October, the Polish waitress came round with plates of ham salad asking "Who ordered pig?".

Which of these groups works in the Showcase projection rooms, I do not know, but the first ten minutes of "La vie en rose" were shown with the wrong lens, so it was horizontally compressed, with half the image and all the subtitles squeezed off. It could be worse. Years ago, I took a Greek friend to see "LA Confidential" at the Showcase and instead we started seeing "Eight heads in a duffelbag". After several minutes the embarassed staff moved the disgruntled audience into another theatre and gave us all free tickets for another show.

Our town centre multiplex, the Vue, has shown two superb European films recently - the peerless "Battle of Algiers" and "The lives of others". Sadly, the audiences when I saw these movies were even thinner than those for Hollywood sequels, so I don't know if they will repeat the experiment. The fact that they would even consider screening "Battle", a 42 year old black and white film in French and Arabic, shows that business must be flagging and they are willing to try anything. Amazingly, given the large Indian population in the Thames Valley and the fact that India has the largest film industry in the world, they have never screened a Bollywood film.

Making a living from the rapidly changing British way of death

Undertakers show their wares at the industry's biggest-ever gathering

Oliver Burkeman
Saturday June 16, 2007
The Guardian

Death comes to us all in the end, but yesterday it paid a special visit to the Stoneleigh Park exhibition centre, outside Coventry, for the biggest-ever gathering of the British funeral industry. And the message it came to deliver was clear: reaping doesn't always have to be grim.

"I'll never forget the first time I exhibited these ones," said Mary Tomes, of Colourful Coffins, gesturing at a display of caskets covered in vivid nature photographs, sports team colours, and sparkling holographic foil. (Another vendor, a few feet away, was exhibiting a coffin designed to look like a KitKat.) "I went to a big meeting, took them along, and when I unveiled them, everybody just sat and stared. Nobody said anything for ages. My husband said, 'Maybe you better sit down.' But eventually someone asked how much they cost, and after that, it all just took off."

Many years ago, Ms Tomes said, "I decided that if anything ever happened to me, I wanted a bright yellow coffin with white daisies. But until recently the technology just wasn't available."

It would be wrong to suggest that pallid gents in pinstripes were entirely absent from the National Funeral Exhibition 2007, which runs until tomorrow. From the gleaming new hearses arrayed outside the venue to the man playing soft organ music on a Yamaha Clavinova, the traditional British way of death was never far away. Most of the £1.2bn we spend each year on funerals still goes towards conventional ceremonies. Even so, there was a distinct sense of long-standing taboos being eroded: of new technologies, and new ways of thinking about dying, being tentatively embraced.

These days, the granite slab above your grave can feature a bust made from a 3D scan of your head, and the web address of a professionally designed online memorial site. A company called Ecocoffins, part of the growing trend for green funerals using biodegradable caskets and woodland burial sites, will sell you the "signature coffin", made of ultra-strong reinforced cardboard, on which funeral guests can write a final message. Or your family can keep your ashes in an urn in the shape of a football.

Innovations like these are badly needed, too, because the funeral industry is facing serious challenges. For a start, there's the costly problem of mercury emissions from dead people's fillings, which crematoriums are legally obliged to minimise, and which was the subject of a seminar at the exhibition yesterday. Then there was the news last week that our cemeteries could be full in 30 years, prompting a government proposal to introduce "double-decker" graves.

Above all, there's the phenomenon no funeral director likes to contemplate: the country's falling death rate. "And it's going to get even worse," sighed Simon Albin-Dyer, of the venerable South London funeral company F Albin & Sons. It will be at least the end of the decade before the baby boomers "come on stream," said one official of the National Association of Funeral Directors, adding one more euphemism for dying to an already long list.

Changing demographics could also prove to be what you might, if you thought you were being clever, call another nail in the coffin of the traditional British funeral. "The East End, where we're based - it's changing," said John Cribb, who owns a fleet of vintage motor-powered and horsedrawn carriages. "There's the strong Muslim influence - well, that takes away business from us. And the eastern European people, they drive over in the car, pick the body up and take it back home. Which doesn't do us a bit of good."

Thinking laterally, the Cribb family are expanding into Ghana, where funerals can attract hundreds of guests from miles around, and where, collectively per funeral, "they spend more than they do over here". Another expanding niche is "repatriation services" - arranging for bodies to be flown from their country of death to their country of burial. Whenever you take a long-haul international flight these days, said Mr Albin-Dyer, "it's more than likely you've got deceased on board".

Strolling the aisles were Peter Vincent, a funeral director from Tasmania, and his wife, Tara. "We're over here on our honeymoon," said Mr Vincent, "and we thought, what could be more romantic than - no, I'm kidding. But it's all very interesting." Like almost every funeral director I met, Mr Vincent inherited a family business, and he gave the consensus explanation for the satisfactions of the job, too. "My father always used to say it's the only industry where people say 'thank you' and mean it," he said. "It's just that thing of being able to help people at one of the worst moments in their lives. You're doing what you can to help them with their grief."

And grief was not really banished from the cavernous exhibition hall, however much it was obscured by layers of euphemism and corporate-speak. On Mary Tomes's exhibition stand, the brightest colours adorned the saddest caskets: child-sized coffins covered with pictures of angels and teddy-bears.

Working in such close proximity to death tends to elicit one of two responses from the public, said Richard Arnold, an embalmer whose recent tasks have involved preparing the bodies of British soldiers in Iraq for the journey home. "There are the people who say 'Oh, that's what you do? How interesting!' and ask you loads of questions. And then there are the ones who say 'You're disgusting'. They don't want to come near you. They don't want to have anything to do with you."

Standing beside a stainless steel, hi-tech autopsy table - which Mr Arnold's employer, Omega Holdings, was selling for £6,500 - he reflected on why he had chosen to join the ranks of Britain's death professionals. No matter how many challenges the industry faces in the modern world, he noted incontrovertibly, its existence in some form is hardly in question.

"My parents said to me: 'You've got to do something that everybody wants'," he said, matter-of-factly. "And I didn't fancy being a midwife."

Blair to Become Pope British Press Report

Dear Stan and Pam,

I thought you might enjoy the attached articles. The first is on the amazing
Fr Michael Seed, (a Fisher of Men if ever there was one), who has recently
published his autobiography. This covers only the 50 years of his life to
date. What will the complete version be like? The second describes, with
appropriately macabre humor, the recent exhibition of funeral goods at
Coventry, about 90 miles north of Reading. Naturally, Barry Albin-Dyer's son
Simon is quoted in the latter article. Probably Barry was too busy to
attend.

Fr Seed was interviewed by Roger Bolton on the regular Radio 4 "Sunday"
program early on 17th June 2007. You could hear the incredulity in Roger's
voice as Fr Seed explained that the worst details of his savage sexual abuse
at the hands of his adopted father had been watered down during the lengthy
editing of his autobiography. As Fr Seed is severely dyslexic, it is amazing
that he has produced any book at all - much less acquired three degrees and
two doctorates.

I was interested to see the idea that we will soon have to double-deck the
graves to fit all the deceased into the horribly expensive land area of
Britain. They have been doing this for centuries in Prague. The Jewish
cemetery in the Old Town could not be expanded due to the cramped ghetto
area, so the Jewish community created layer after layer of graves. The
"ground level" inside the cemetery is several feet above the level of the
surrounding streets. The "new" Jewish cemetery to the east of the city
centre, beside the TV tower, was created in the late 18th century when
Jewish emancipation meant that they could live and bury their dead outside
the ghetto. When I visited the new cemetery in 2003, it was a revelation to
see the languages on the tombstones. Most were inscribed with Hebrew.
Perhaps 10-15% were in German - to get ahead in the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
you had to learn German, just as you have to know English in present-day
Prague. I saw only one grave with a Czech epitaph in this Czech graveyard.

A few years ago there was a long-running story that Liz Hurley was going to
convert and, if my failing memory is correct, that Fr Seed was her spiritual
mentor. It was around the time of Hugh Grant's misadventure with Divine
Brown in Hollywood and the combination gave the cartoonists plenty of fun.
Our satirical magazine "Private Eye" ran a photo of Liz and Hugh topped with
the title "Hurley to become Catholic". Liz's speech balloon declared "It's a
divine calling", while the harrassed-looking Hugh retorted "Tell her I'm
out". I don't know if Liz has ever converted, though she certainly had her
out-of-wedlock son (by a different paramour) christened in a Catholic
church.

The Father Seed article was yet another reminder of the different worlds
within the small world of English Catholicism. In February I mentioned the
very "up-market" Brompton Oratory as an example of an upper-middle
class/upper class parish for wealthy Londoners. A recent newspaper article
mentioned a Brompton parishioner - a devout German noblewoman with an
eye-watering family fortune and a name longer than a Henry James sentence.
St James, Spanish Place is another prime example of a church for the
well-heeled. Compared with Brompton Oratory, it is an austerely decorated
building, but it has splendid proportions and the scale of a cathedral. It
is only ten minutes walk north of Oxford Street, so it is conveniently
placed for some of the most expensive shopping in the world. Around 1992, a
well-connected friend told me that the starting price to book St James for a
wedding would be £5,000+ (currently $10,000), so you can guess what it might
be now.

As you can see from the article, Fr Seed is practically court chaplain to
Tony Blair. Tony Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, comes from a stern
Scottish Presbyterian background - his father was actually a church minister
- so even Fr Seed will have an uphill struggle to convert him.


Inevitably the religious lives of the rich and famous attract doubters. The
(staunchley atheist) political columnist Simon Heffer wrote a suitably
sceptical article in the "Daily Telegraph" of 16th June 2007:


"The Pope's Catholic, but is Tony Blair?

The air is thick with rumours that the Prime Minister will, on leaving
Downing Street, convert to Roman Catholicism. I don't doubt Mr Blair is
sincerely religious, but I wonder how he would handle the teachings of the
Catholic Church? After all, as a recent convert from the world of politics,
Ann Widdecombe, said this week in another context, Catholicism is not a
"pick and mix" religion. Why go through the business of converting and,
indeed, dropping in to see the Pope next week as your last overseas public
engagement, if on converting you might not be able to accept some of the
Pope's most fundamental teachings? I am very unclear where Mr Blair stands
on abortion. His party seems at times so much in favour of it that I'm
surprised it hasn't made it compulsory. In the Church that he may be about
to join, it is one of the most unspeakable sins. Perhaps now that he has no
more elections to fight, and no need to pretend to be all things to all
people, Mr Blair will confront this issue: and what fun it will be if he
does. "

Most of the British population are unclear as to where Tony Blair stands on
anything, not just abortion. Again, "Private Eye" have had endless pleasure
with the overtly pious persona he projects and have run a riotously funny
page throughout his ten year reign. This page is the weekly newsletter of St
Albion's Church, with the Reverend A. Blair as vicar and Gordon Brown as the
hapless parish treasurer. Another British political journalist declared
(correctly) that Tony Blair "unblushingly reads from the first letter to the
Corinthians as if he had personally written it". Will a recent "Private Eye"
photograph prove to be a true prophecy in jest? It shows Tony in a
remorseful pose beside our local lad, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.
"Forgive me, for I have spinned", he confesses. The title reads: "BLAIR TO
BECOME POPE?"

William Murphy,

Don't Drop the Coffin

Dear Stan and Pam,

I enclose some more material on our wonderful Douai Abbey and hope that it persuades you to make a persona visit. North Atlantic airfares and falling through the floor; one of the maverick airline owners, Mr. Ryan of Ryanair fame, is promising NY-London fares of #7 ($13) one way. What the taxes and additional charges will be is anyone's guess.

(I check, Bill, nothing on RyanAir's website except EU travel, and Northwest's cheapest is $1,107 US. - sw) (Yeah, you're right. Ryanair only do European flights at present. They were the European equivalent of South Western for dirt cheap flights; mind you, customer service and safety are also at a discount. Horror stories abound. Friends of mine have found themselves abandoned abroad without support when flights were cancelled. On one infamous emergency landing, with an engine on fire, the cabin crew didn't know how to work the emergency exits. This is hardly surprising when Ryannair staff are expected to pay for their own safety training - the cheapest English-language training is in Poland, so you can imagine the scope for misunderstanding. I am typing this from the idyllic island of Aegina, about 15 miles west of Athens. I am staying with friends in the southern suburb of Glyfada (where Jackie O's Greek in-laws have a villa). It is a 50 minute trip by hydrofoil from Piraeus to Aegina. I came here by Easyjet, the dearer but safer alternative to Ryanair. I wish Easyjet would start long-distant flights. -- Bill)

I thought you might enjoy the biography of Barry Albin-Dyer, Britain's most famous funeral director and a Catholic convert (p. 156/7). I bought the book after my Father's death in 2003, when I had to arrange his funeral, and shortly after the death of a friend who died without any traceable family. So, I ended up organizing Brian's funeral as well as my Dad's, and had considerable dealings with local funeral directors, nearly all of whom are branches of large national companies -- even though some retain the names of the local family from which was taken over by the giant company years ago.

Of course, any book on funerals could not help but be riotously funny places. But skip pages 49-74 if you are all squeamish, as he does not evade the gruesome aspects of this profession. Music at funerals is always controversial. My dad's funeral director, Carole, told me about a young widow who was arranging her 34-year old husband's funeral. She was utterly clueless, as most British people are when arranging funerals, and struggled to choose appropriate music. Eventually, she suggested Freddy Mercury's song "Who wants to live forever?"

I remember a visit to the magnificent Ely Cathedral (near Cambridge, about 80 miles North of London). The cathedral staff kept tourists out of one of the chapels while a funeral was in progress. I visited other parts o this wonderful building while speakers at the funeral droned on about the virtues of the deceased — teacher at the local grammar school, pillar of the community, etc. Then the funeral came to an end and the coffin was carried out at the head of the procession of solemn-faced mourners. The vaulted ceiling of this peerless building resonated to a recording of Ravel's Bolero -- which is a musical depiction of an orgasm. I wondered if this was a none-to-subtle hint that the dear departed was a b it of a goat in his spare time.

Barry's book contains fascinating comments on American funerals, though he omits the funniest funeral director in movies — Liberace advising a young couple on the choice of lining for their uncle's casket. The movie is "The Loved One," that parody of the American way of death which Barry Albin-Dyer detests. The unctious funeral director is counselling the young couple as to whether they want a nylon or a real silk lining for their uncle's casket. He enquires: "Your uncle was a sensitive person, was he not?" They say "Oh, yes, yes." He advises "Nylon chafes." Just imagine - you're lying in a dark box for all eternity and your neck's itching like crazy because your cheapskate nephew wouldn't fork out a few more lousy bucks for a decent lining. — Detroit gets honorable mention as a pioneering centre of cryonics.

Even Princess Diana gets into the book, though I doubt that she spent much time n S.E. London. Also, in view of the current demonstrations of Iran, p. 82 ff is interesting. (No kidding, Bill, I couldn't put the book down.) I remember the boycotting of the Iranian rebels and the portrayals of Ayatollah Khomeini as a dangerous demagogue — but the British government was quietly trading with Iran behind the scenes (and sending the Ayatollah heart specialists, I read in Barry's book - sw)

Best wishes.

Bill

(Reader: Mr. Albin-Dyer has other great books. Here are a few, including Don't Drop the Coffin 2.)

Amazing Grace, Modern Slavery, Easter Triduum

Dear Stan,

I was delighted to see your review of "Amazing Grace" posted on the Internet Movie Database www.imdb.com, alongside all the "big name" movie reviewers from the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, etc. I hope you become a regular presence on what must be the best movie site on the Web.

[Thanks, Bill. All my reviews from the Moral Premise blog have been submitted to imdb, but it takes weeks sometimes for them to appear.]

I saw "Amazing Grace" last night and loved it. Apart from anything else, it reminded me of a lecture on drug abuse I attended years ago, where the speaker pointed out that just about every "problem" drug on the illicit market today was originally prescribed by the medical profession as a wonder cure for some ailment or other. Poor Wilberforce was yet another victim of the 18th century quacks who were so wonderfully caricatured in "The madness of King George".

Also, it reminded me of the comments of the makers of "Chariots of Fire" on the character of Eric Lidell, the Scottish missionary and Olympic gold medalist who was so memorably immortalized in the movie. (I was willing to forgive the countless liberties the filmmakers took with the facts). It was so difficult for everyone (writer, director and actor) to portray a truly good person without making him slightly unreal and unworldly in the eyes of a cynical modern audience. The makers of "Amazing Grace" do not fully escape that problem. I felt that their William Wilberforce had too much of the innocence of the lamb and not enough of the cunning of the serpent which would be necessary to push through such a radical change in the snakepit of British politics.

Also, as people in the UK have been very loudly celebrating the 200th anniversary of Wilberforces's triumph, others have pointed out that there are more slaves in the world today than in the 18th century. The modern slave trade is back in Britain with a vengeance; only instead of being centered on the great seaports, such as Liverpool and Bristol, it is based at the major airports such as Heathrow. The modern slaves are mainly female, often from Eastern Europe and tend to be coerced into the sex trade. One estimate claimed that up to 80% of prostitutes in the UK are from Eastern Europe and are as mercilessly bound to their vile masters as the plantation workers in the 18th century. One aspect of the recent serial murders of prostitutes in Ipswich, which surprised me was that all five victims were British girls, born and raised within a small radius of the town. Not surprisingly, all five were victims of another slavery - drug addiction- and plied their desperate and dangerous trade to feed their habit. Unlike Wilberforce, they lacked the strength to break their addiction. The modern British police have the legal powers to pursue the modern slavers, but they seem to lack the resources or the political will to hound them out of business.

One possible suspect in the Ipswich case was Volker Eckert, a German long-distance truck driver suspected of killing up to 19 women across Europe between 1974 and 2006 before the Cologne police arrested him last November. His victims in France and Spain were not French or Spanish girls, but East European sex workers, yet more modern slaves. Half the police forces in Europe are dusting off their unsolved murders and queuing up to question him. The Ipswich police have arrested a local man and no more murders have happened, which suggests that they caught the right guy. I can only hope that the ferocious media pressure to catch someone has not lead to yet another miscarriage of justice; we have a grim collection of those already to the discredit of various British police forces and prosecuting authorities.

On a happier note, I have been going to the Easter Triduum services at our wonderful local Benedictine Abbey, Douai, which is about 10 miles west of Reading. The abbey bears the name of the northern French town from which the monks were exiled in 1903 as a result of anti-clerical legislation. The French loss was our gain, as the music (under Doctor John Rowntree) is sublime and the monks offer huge spiritual enrichment to the diocese, with retreats, lectures and wonderful liturgies galore. The abbey has recently reestablished a foothold in Douai by sending two monks to live for the long term in a house in the town. This "mini-monastery" has been warmly welcomed by local people and the two "anglais" monks are making heroic efforts to preach and pray in French.

Happy Easter to all your family

Bill

A VISIT TO LONDON

February 2, 2007

Dear San and Pam:

See page 48 of the enclosed Jan/Feb 2007 "FAITH" magazine! And the rest of it makes pretty good reading also. [FAITH is a UK journal that promotes the synthesis of faith and reason. On page 48 was this movie review:]

MOVIES THAT INSPIRE
Those who attended the Faith summer Session might have seen Fishers of Men, the powerful and moving new vocations film commissioned by the American bishops' conference. It was produced by this state-of-the-art company, based in Brooklyn, New York. The website quotes Pope John Paul II on the influence of film and continues: "The mission of Grassroots films is to give the audience what it is already starving for: Truth".

Nineveh's Crossing has been selling copies of Fishers of Men to British and U.S. customers for about a year now. A clip of the film can be found at http://www.NinevehsCrossing.com.]

Bill continues...

On 2nd Feb I visited London for the first time in years and called at Brompton Oratory, a magnificent Italianate church next to the equally magnificent Victoria and Albert Museum. It is my favorite Catholic church in London. On Sundays sit tends to be filled with London's upper middle class Italian and Spanish families. to my amazement, on Friday 2nd, I entered it in the middle of 10:00 am Mass and it was almost full to the doors. Mass went until 11:15am and people did not rush to leave after the final hymn; they stayed for a dignified recessional procession. Admittedly, there were a lot of boys from the associated school, but it was an amazing sight for the feat of the Presentation (not a holy day of obligation).

I visited the Victoria and Albert immediately after Mass, mainly because: 1) I desperately needed the bathroom, 2) Admission is free, and 3) I figured I was less likely to catch an unpleasant disease there than in numerous other London public washrooms I could name.

But it was a reminder of what a truly extraordinary world-class museum the V+A is. You might compare it with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in N.Y., but with a wider range of exhibits. It has been hugely updated since my last visit. Check out www.vam.ac.uk for a virtual holiday! The European galleries in particular contain countless Catholic artifact, statues, frescoes, altar pieces, chalices, monstrances, Paten's, etc.

Best wishes,

Bill

The Frivolity of Evil

Dear Stan,

I do not know if you are acquainted with the writings of Theodore Dalrymple, a retired British doctor, who must be one of the best essayists in the English language. He follows in a long line of wonderful doctor writers, such as Checkhov and A J Cronin. His favourite theme is the ongoing cultural decay of British society. As a former doctor in a prison and the grim inner city area of Birmingham, he gives you a view on British society which you don't get from Tony Blair or the tourist brochures. Here is a link to his The Frivolity of Evil at the excellent New York magazine "City Journal", which has a large library of his previous articles.

Sadly, he is an atheist, but his deeply moral perspective is so close to the traditional Catholic approach to evil that I hope he might enter the fold eventually. In view of the highly suspect basic American "right" proclaiming "the pursuit of happiness", he correctly senses that you cannot separate happiness from the virtuous life. If you think his descriptions of the depravity of the British underclass (and some "higher" sections of society) are exaggerated, you don't know the half of it.

In 2005, we in boring, prosperous Reading had a truly disgusting glimpse of the underside of the criminal activity around us when a 16 year old girl was kidnapped by a drug dealing gang, then tortured, sexually abused and murdered in Prospect Park on the west side of town, about 2 miles west of St James and 200 yards from English Martyrs' Church. Even by British standards, it was one of the worst killings in decades. (BBC Story)

In the last three weeks the citizens of boring, prosperous Ipswich, 70 miles north-east of London, have been swamped by hundreds of police and media people chasing the killer(s) of five prostitutes, all heroin addicts. It is a re-run of "Jack the Ripper", but in utterly different economic and moral circumstances. The only remotely interesting thing I ever heard about Ipswich until three weeks ago is that Eric Blair, who loved that region of England, adopted the River Orwell, which flows through the town, as part of his pen name - George Orwell. Now it is on the news 24 hours a day for all the wrong reasons.

Best wishes

Bill