h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. With the two new children's books now out and in the world, and only seven weeks to Christmas, the publicity campaign has been stepped up even further. If possible.

Nigel, Dusty and Kitty have been their usual catty selves and are all well. Kitty still keeps up her unique dialogue with me every time I feed her.

"Hello, Kitty, what was the name of that revolutionary leader again?"

"Mao!"

"Do you want feeding later, Kitty, or now?"

"Nao!"

And so it goes on. A small idiocy, but mine own. Little things please little minds. I ought to get it on tape one day, then I could cheer myself up by playing the exchange in bleaker moments.

Tig has been reluctant to go out in the garden especially as the mornings have been getting darker. I hold the conservatory door open for her and she stands there sniffing the rain and looking at me with her head on one side as much as to say "if you think for one minute that I am going out there in that rain and dark and cold, you must be out of your tiny little Chinese mind!"

Russell has not been so good this week, he has been off his food and what my late mother would have called "wowy", an adjective which she probably invented and which was always reserved exclusively in our household and in her vocabulary for the specific description of poorly cats. So, I don't know. He spends a lot of time curled up in the chair nearest the stove, maybe the warmth helps him, I don't know. In her book, The Cat Whisperer, Claire Besant says that older cats like warmth. Next week he goes back to be re-weighed and we will know if he is gaining or losing ground.

His tablet-taking has now entered a new dimension, with "Bernard Maffews" American fried chicken now currently being used as the medium of choice.

With Christmas so close, we've started already working towards books which are due early in 2005, including the delayed "Hampshire at War 1939-45, an Oral History". Pat, the author, and her husband John, very kindly drove up to Huddersfield and we spent the weekend in a Travelodge in Mirfield going through the manuscript on a lap top computer. Having spent two days closeted in a Travelodge, I now I know what it feels like to be a terrorist. Anyway, came Sunday and the task was, at last, if not finished, as near finished as makes no difference. With Pat and John safely ensconced back at the Travelodge watching "Foyles War" (enough war, already!) Debbie and I decided that the only solution to our hunger was a takeaway.

We toasted "Hampshire at War" with a dry red Portuguese table wine, which tasted as if it had been made from dry red Portuguese tables, or at least used to strip the varnish off them. Fortunately, the secret mix of oriental herbs and spices in the takeaway from The Balooshai was powerful enough to numb the palate as a local anaesthetic, and save it from the full effect of the vino collapso.

It is a strange coincidence that I have been working on Hampshire at War in the weeks running up to Armistice Day. I am quite a believer in synchronicity, the way in which sometimes disparate things come together to form strange yet meaningful patterns in our lives. Again, like the theory of multiple dimensions, it’s another facet of the universe being bigger, stranger and wackier than anyone – with the possible exception of Big G himself – could possibly imagine. Like the sign over the male grooming products counter in Superdrug, it is all a case of “Mens Deo”. Who can know the mind of God. I guess it is just one of those unanswerable questions like “what do occasional tables do the rest of the time?” and “why can you never find your camouflage net?”

One of the things that has struck me about this book, where the people of Hampshire tell of their experiences of wartime, in their own words, is just how much heroism there was in ordinary, everyday life. Take, for instance, the story of the Wren whose father sent her his favourite rosary, in the post, with no explanation: she assumed the worst when she received it and phoned her home, asking her mother "Is father dead?"

With commendable sang froid, the mother replied "I don't think so dear, I have just cooked his breakfast, but I will check" returning later to the phone to say "no, he is not dead, he's just finished his egg". Ah, the unflappable nature of the British stiff upper lip.

At this time of year, as we move up to Rememberance Sunday, and hear news of the Queen also laying a wreath at the German equivalent of the Cenotaph during her state visit there, war and its effects seem to be everywhere around me. In the second world war, about 55 million people died. Roughly equivalent to the population of the British Isles. The statistics of war are quite startling, when you view them like that. A whole country-worth of people, many in their teens or early twenties, scattered like leaves on the wind, all those unfulfilled hopes and dreams, all those unkept promises. In 55 million people there would undoubtedly have been some villains, some who we wouldn’t miss – Hitler for one – but who knows but that just one of those people whose life was tragically cut short, might not have, in other circumstances, had events ran differently, been the person to discover the cure for cancer, or some other dread disease. All that waste.

This week, it has been reported that 100,000 Iraquis have died under the current misguided attempt to bring “democracy” to Iraq. If this is true, it is a crushing blow to both George Bush and Tony Blair. No one knows for sure how many people Hussein killed, of course, and any attempt to get to the bottom of the figures founders on the rock that the idea of “responsibility” in a totalitarian state, is a very complex one. If someone murders a prisoner because they think that is what the dictator wanted, is the dictator responsible, even if he had no idea it was going on?

This week, America, currently still bitterly engaged in a massive undeclared war in Iraq, will probably make one final attempt to raze Fallujah to the ground, at the same time as George Bush makes one final attempt to cling to power. George Bush is of course, supported in his idea of a never-ending, unwinnable (in pure military terms) war against “terror” by various people in the US and elsewhere who refer to themselves as Christians, and who specifically see their mission as being to evangelise.

I love America and many of the things it stands for, but I am unable in my heart to reconcile these paradoxes: people who purport to represent religion urging on a destructive conflict on what many believe to be the wrong target, led in the name of democracy by someone who may not even have been democratically elected.

As Joni Mitchell wrote, about a different war, Vietnam, in 1969,

And so once again

Oh, America my friend

And so once again

You are fighting us all

And when we ask you why

You raise your sticks and cry and we fall

Oh, my friend

How did you come

To trade the fiddle for the drum

Would Jesus recognise the idea of a just war? Who has the power, the moral authority, to claim they have God on their side? The Christians I most admire from the last war are people like Bishop Bell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who are both about as far away from Billy Graham as you can get without actually leaving the planet. We are back to those unanswerable questions again.

I recommend a detailed study – especially for people like George W Bush and Tony Blair, of a seminal religious tract – Bob Dylan’s “With God on our Side”. The whole song exposes the fallacy of the concept of politicians manipulating the concept of “the just war” but I can only squeeze in the last verse.

“So now as I'm leavin'

I'm weary as Hell

The confusion I'm feelin'

Ain't no tongue can tell

The words fill my head

And fall to the floor

If God's on our side

He'll stop the next war.”

God of course only works through man, or so we are told. Let’s hope he moves the hearts of many Americans to turn their country away from the road that leads to four more years of carnage. It is time to take the fiddle from the wall, dust it off, and play the tunes of liberty and freedom once again.