Last night I went to hear an Anglican priest speak in a church in Surrey. This morning I turned on my computer to learn that a woman who might well have been one of his congregation had been shot dead in her home.
The vicar was Canon Andrew White, of the Memorial Church of St George of Mesopotamia in Baghdad. The woman was Rafah Toma, who lived alone in the centre of that city. According to an official of the Iraqi interior ministry, she was probably killed because she was a Christian (though later reports have suggested the motive was robbery).
Canon White was at St Paul’s, Howell Hill, in Cheam, to ask for prayers and money to support his congregation, which was once a handful of expats but is now comprised of 4,000 Iraqis, most of them women and children. They are being targeted in what he says is “a major Al-Qaeda-led onslaught against Christians in the Middle East”. He talked of how he had baptised 13 people last year, only to see 11 of them killed the following week.
On Thursday (according to a report today by the AFP agency), at least two Christians were killed and 16 wounded in a wave of bomb attacks. In October, 44 worshippers, two priests and seven security-force members were killed in an attack on a Syrian Catholic church.
Canon White spoke movingly both of his mission and of the trials facing what he referred to constantly as “my people”; a people whose ancestors, he said, had been introduced to Christianity, in Nineveh, by Jonah. By turns his tone was amusing, teasing, challenging and apocalyptic.
He’s a big man — six and a half feet tall, shoes you could put to sea in and a bow tie the size of a monarch butterfly — and he talks a muscular Christianity. But you can listen to him with interest and profit even if you’re a puny lapsed Catholic like me.
At his ordination in 1986, he was asked what he would like to be doing in 20 years’ time. Running a parish in London, with some hospital chaplaincy on the side, he suggested. Instead, he ended up running the International Centre for Reconciliation at Coventry Cathedral, where he decided that few places were more in need of reconciliation than post-war Iraq. When he contracted multiple sclerosis, and was told that he was too ill to continue in the Church of England, he went to Baghdad.
There, a pioneering doctor has been injecting him in the spine with his own stem cells, a treatment that has relieved all his symptoms apart from poor balance. “I never dreamt I would go to Baghdad to get well,” he joked. Then he added: “If we are where God has called us to be, he will restore us to do what he wants us to do.”
What God wants him to do, he believes, is to carry on working for peace and running his church, which has a clinic offering the services of both doctors and dentists (one Muslim, one Jew, one Christian, all three Iraqis) and a relief programme that sends worshippers away with a bag of groceries. “It’s been great being with my children and my wife [for Christmas],” he said, “but tomorrow I am going home.”
I’m looking forward to reading his book, Iraq: Searching for Hope. The blurb promises that it deals with the question of whether religion in that benighted country is part of the problem or the solution.
You can find out more about Canon White’s church at the website of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.

Apple can sometimes overdo the minimalism. I bought a SuperDrive to go with my new MacBook Air. I plugged the drive into the laptop. Nothing came up on my screen to suggest that the drive had been mounted. I inserted a CD. The CD whirred a bit and came out again. The MacBook Air seemed OK, so was the SuperDrive broken?

I Googled the phrase “macbook air superdrive doesn’t work”, and among the offerings was a page from a discussion forum on Apple, from 2008, with a query from a contributor having the same problem as me. He was advised to go back to the shop. He did, and then reported:

The external [drive] has an Apple logo on the black side. I thought it was the top side . . . I was putting the disc in upside down. No, the brushed aluminum is the top of the drive. So now when you insert the disc it is not upside down and the optical drive can read it. Man, am I embarrassed!

He went on to say:

The drive when attached does not show up on the desktop until a disk is actually inserted.

Apple could have spared both of us — and probably quite a few more people — a lot of frustration by providing a couple of lines of instructions to make all that clear.

I remember reading, in pre internet days, more than one article suggesting that the newspaper of the future would be a sort of smorgasbord in which the reader would choose the columnists and features he liked best from, say, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the FT, and have them collated in a single, tailor-made publication. Who would do the collating? That was never clear. Certainly not the newspaper publishers, who were too busy competing to collaborate. With classified advertising all but gone, newspapers are more desperate now, and technology, as John Lanchester points out in the current London Review of Books, makes the Daily Smorgasbord much easier to put together. It could be “a cross between a print version of Spotify, with a dash of Amazon and a dash of iTunes”. And that’s the kind of online paper, he suggests, that readers — at least older readers — might be prepared to pay for.

A link to my piece on the Indian Pacific, which went online at the weekend.

My favourite comment on Australia’s recent weather, from Bill Leak, cartoonist at The Australian:

It looks as though the Australia I’ll be travelling through on the Indian Pacific from Sydney to Perth (4,352kms or 2,698 miles) will be lusher than I expected.  Farmers of grain and fruit are all complaining of unseasonal rain. According to today’s Sydney Morning Herald (Wed Dec 1), spring rainfall has been well above average over inland New South Wales. “With 256mm of rain, Sydney has had the wettest spring in six years and the coolest in 11 years.”

When I took the ferry in the drizzle from Sydney to Manly yesterday, I found this example of Aussie optimism outside the Bavarian Bier Cafe: “Stay out of the rain with Happy Hour . . .  There is a ray of sunshine in every glass.”

A colleague of mine used to collect examples of the “dangler” — “a word or phrase that’s in the wrong place at the wrong time”, as Patricia T O’Conner, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, once put it. She offered a couple of great examples: “Born at the age of 43, the baby was a great comfort to Mrs Wooster”; and “Tail wagging merrily, Bertie took the dog for a walk.”

Danglers seem to be becoming increasingly common. There were a couple of horrors, one right after the other, in an Evening Standard story today about the British bride, Anni Dewani, who was murdered when she and her husband, Shrien, were attacked and robbed on honeymoon in South Africa:

“But within three minutes of leaving the motorway, two gunmen hijacked the taxi. After robbing them both, Mr Dewani was thrown out of the people carrier’s back window. ”

As the Standard has it, it was the gunmen, rather than the honeymoon couple in their taxi, who left the motorway — and it was Mr Dewani who robbed the gunmen.

I was looking forward to writing about Colombia and not mentioning the word “drugs”. Bit tricky now that I’ve been suspected by the police at two airports of being a smuggler myself. Or did they take me for a terrorist?
Returning from Cartagena after researching a preview of the Telegraph Hay Festival, I was handing over my boarding card for a flight to Bogotá when I heard a call for “Señor Michael James Kerr” to approach the desk. Two policemen wanted me to go with them so they could open my checked-in suitcase, which had aroused the interest of their sniffer dog.
I followed them back through the security arch and behind the check-in desks, where they asked me to identify my case. Then they asked me to open it. As a loop of stiff plastic had been put through the ends of the zips after I had checked it in, they had to cut the loop off.
Then they went through everything, sniffing at clothes, books and toiletries and jabbing a penknife through the soles of my walking boots. (If they let in water next time I’m trekking, can I sue?)
I worried that something might have been planted on me. What if my daughter, who had borrowed this case, were less opposed to drug-taking than she has always claimed to be? And she had been to Amsterdam recently . . . I had visions of a night in a Colombian jail and a visit from a sceptical Foreign Office man.
Then one of the officers twisted the lid off a bottle of handwash gel, took a deep sniff, and said, “It must have been this.” Both of them, who had been very polite, apologised for the inconvenience and one of them escorted me back through security to ensure I didn’t miss my flight.
A few hours later, waiting in the departure lounge in Bogotá for a flight to Madrid, I heard my name called again. I went forward and was ushered through to join the business-class passengers. Great, I thought: they’re going to upgrade me. They weren’t.
Having told me to sit down and gone off with my boarding card, one of the Iberia staff reappeared five minutes later and asked me to follow him towards the plane. Instead, of boarding it, however, I was directed to the left of the gangway, where four or five police officers were standing over a man whose case was being searched. In front of that case, and quite a bit grubbier than when I had last seen it, was mine.
Again I was asked to open it. Again I pointed to the plastic fastener, which had to be cut off. Again the case was turned inside out. Books were sniffed, and their pages fanned to see if anything fell out. Among them was Rosario Tijeras, a novel by the Colombian writer Jorge Franco about a young woman who gets mixed up with the drug cartels.
The officers stuffed everything back in inside and I did my best to tidy it all up. This time they had been brusquer and there was no apology.
Now, if I had been less tired, I might have dumped the bottle of handwash after the cop’s guess that that was what had excited the dog in Cartagena. But I was too rushed and flustered. With hindsight, I’m now wondering why, given the interest they showed in my case, the cops didn’t so much as glance at my hand luggage. Surely if they had really thought I was a smuggler or a shoe-bomber they would have gone through that, too. . .
The hand gel was Cussons Carex. The label says “it kills 99 per cent of bacteria”. Maybe. But if sniffer dogs take it for drogas, I won’t be carrying it again.

Footnote: as I’ll be making plain in my piece for the Telegraph, due in early December, those encounters with the police were the only scary moments during my week in Colombia. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Bogota and in the dreamily  picturesque city of Cartagena.



Reading up on Colombian history for a forthcoming trip to Cartagena, I learn that Belisario Betancur won the presidential election of 1982 after campaigning with the slogan “Sí se puede” (“Yes, it can be done”). Sound familiar? There’s no mention of whether he subsequently had trouble with a Tea Party . . .

If you want to read that piece on the Yemen  I mentioned earlier, here’s the link