Gruts

Chicken and cashew nut stir fry for dinner this evening. It was so good that I've decided to add a new Recipes section to the website. Watch this space.

BBC: Archbishop attacks Church pomp
The Church's status as Britain's official state religion has been recently criticised as an anachronism in an age where the UK has millions of Catholics, Muslims and non-conformist Christians. Dr Williams said he was sceptical about the Church of England's position as the established state church. But many will feel it is a debate the new archbishop should not re-open, particularly as there is little interest in the subject among non-religious people.

Wrong! The anachronistic existence of an official British state religion should be a matter of immense interest (and irritation) to any non-religious person. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I'm with the Archbishop of Canterbury on this one.

BBC: Australia retain the Ashes
Australia secured the Ashes series on Sunday, after coasting to an innings victory at the Waca inside three days. England have now lost eight series in a row against the old enemy.

So, it's official: England are crap at a crap game. Don't get me wrong, I'd have liked us to have won (if only to stop the Australians being so unbearably smug about it), but am I the only person in England who isn't particularly bothered by this supposed catastrophe? We're a cricketing joke. So what?

Personally speaking, I think my countrymen should be far more concerned about the impression we give to strangers to our country, as expressed by Iqbal Ahmed in this week's edition of the London Review of Books:

Where I come from, people believe that every Englishman is an intellectual. I was shocked and demoralised to find the intellect of the same Englishmen feeding on tabloids. I hadn't thought that intellectual activities meant a quiz night in the pub or a quiz show on the television. Englishness means self-centredness and unsociability. They would do a crossword rather than engage in a conversation with someone. It is not the weather which has made me feel cold in the Englishman's country after ten years, but the indifference shown by its citizens.

But hang on a second. Aren't taking part in quizzes, doing the crossword and being unsociable as quintessentially English as drinking warm beer, and being crap at cricket? Take that away from us, and we stop being English! And it's all well and good bemoaning the lack of English intellectual activities (whatever they are), but we can't all be as cerebral and erudite as Julian Date.

BBC: India marvels at 'miracle chapati'

Hundreds of Christian pilgrims and other curious onlookers have been making their way to a church in Bangalore in India to see a chapati which has the image of Christ burnt into it.

Well, after all, Jesus was supposed to be the bread of life.

Guardian: Pampered prince puts sun king in shade
His lifestyle would seem extravagant to Louis XIV: a team of four valets so that one is always available to lay out and pick up his clothes; a servant to squeeze his toothpaste on to his brush, and another who once held the specimen bottle while he gave a urine sample. Step into the world of the Prince of Wales, a lifestyle so pampered that even the Queen has complained that it is grotesque.

Required reading for all royalists.

Do runner beans set pulses racing?

• Buy Bruce Sprinsgsteen tickets

That'll do nicely. Then, just a few hours later...

BBC: Moors Murderer Hindley dies

The day just gets better and better.

Ladies and Gentlemen, to celebrate the new (admittedly sparse) Songs & Poems section of this website, I give you Elizabeth Hurley.

If there's one thing that irritates me more than Freudian bullshit, it's Freudian bullshit being applied to my hero, Charles Darwin. You can imagine my reaction, therefore, to reading the following in the latest edition of The London Review of Books:

'Any form represented by few individuals,' Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, 'will, during fluctuations in the seasons or the number of its enemies, run a good chance of utter extinction.' That both these words need qualifying should give us pause. Darwin could see the appeal of extinction; or rather, something about extinction appealed to him. When he describes the all-consuming struggle of species to survive and reproduce there is occasionally, lurking in his sentences, something about the all too human option of giving up. We are, after all, the animals that are making the seasons fluctuate and the animals with a genius for creating enemies. All our self-destructive behavious, whatever else we think it is, may be an attempt to put a stop to the struggle. And if we begin to hate our own struggle for survival, we may want to suppress it in others. Clearly, our capacity to destroy other species - not to mention others that belong to our own species - was the most staggering fact of the last century. It is not surprising that it occurred to some people that there might be a secret struggle not to survive, that utter extinction might be our best chance.

Who is this Freudian joker? I wondered, irritatedly flicking to the author information section, where I learnt that the chap who wrote the piece, Adam Phillips, has edited the new Penguin Freud.

Now, I'm not in the habit of writing to such august intellectual journals as The London Review of Books, but I was damned if I was going to let this nonsense go unchallenged, so I sent them an e-mail. Here's what I wrote:

Adam Phillips (LRB, 31 October) has been editing Freud for far too long. Darwin didn't need specious psychoanalyical reasons for seeing an 'appeal' in extinction. In the paragraph of Origin of Species following the one quoted in Phillips's opening sentence, we learn the real reason for extinction's appeal:

"I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct."

Extinction appealed to Darwin because it is a logical consequence of his theory of natural selection; not because he somehow 'hate[d] our own struggle for survival'.

So, as Freud would no doubt have said, stick that one up your anus and retain it there, Mr Phillips.