A Farewell to Arms

I'm glad the Pope's against the war. Because so am I, and so is Horace Morris, and so are quite a number of other people I know.

The Pope and I don't always see eye to eye, but I'm bound to admit that on this one I think he's got hold of the right end of the stick. "No more war, war never again..." as he told the assembled delegates of the U.N. "If you wish to be brothers, let the arms fall from your hands." It touches a chord. In fact, judging by the headlines and the discussions on television, it seems to have evoked widespread acknowledgement and admiration, and no disagreement at all.

How easy, how tragically easy, would it have been for him to get it all back to front. "More war, war again and again!" as he might so easily have said. "Let's have a little more mindless mayhem—let's see the hands fall from your arms!"

The Bad and the Beautiful

I'm always about the fifty millionth citizen of these inlands to latch on to any new cultural trend, but I must say I think I caught up with one at a dinner party the other night when it was seriously proposed that we should abandon the pleasures of the meal and of our own conversation in order to go out into the cold night and find a television set, because a programme was being shown which we all felt would be notably bad.

Suddenly I saw it all. It's badness that's the ultimate good in art and entertainment.

Inside the Krankenhaus

I'm learning a lot from the series the Daily Mirror are publishing by Auberon Waugh and his wife ("the brilliant young Waughs," as the Mirror calls them). They're travelling about Europe, sending back a piece a week on the national characteristics of each country they visit.

The Germans are the latest race to come under their microscope. "Our idea of the country," writes Mr. Waugh, "had been formed by seeing war films in which all Germans shout ‘Ach so! Gott in Himmel!'" He was agreeably surprised to find that this was not the case in the Federal Republic today, and almost as surprised by the sheer variety of the German race. "Germans come in all sizes," he reports, "fat, thin, tall, short, dark, fair. Some are cheerful, some gloomy."

Ha Lo and the Electric Talker

My morbid interest in the Philosophy and Technology of the Telephone continues. Did you see not long back that there is a man in the New Forest whose telephone rings every time he flushes the lavatory? I have the cutting filed somewhere under "Telephones, Nervous Disorders of." Though if it turns out to be also the case that the lavatory flushes every time the telephone rings, I may have to change the diagnosis. Flushing whenever the phone rings — I guess that's just love.