I hope my prolonged absence from this website will not have driven away any of my huge readership. I have just got back from Sainsbury's, having taken my auntie shopping and tempted her to buy a full-fat quiche rather than the dry and soulless Be Good To Yourself phoney. I'm in Oxford till the end of the week, relaxing, working on my dad's biography, and continuing to read 1984. All of my dreams seem to involve death recently, which is at best slightly irritating, since it results in me waking up several times a night. They are always slightly surreal. Last night's dreams also involved me walking around on some kind of huge climbing frame-esque structure. I was arguing with someone and trying to convince them that I should go down, while he was trying to make me continue to go higher. I remember dreaming that I broke down and cried every time I passed a certain point in the street. At the moment, I will put it down to too much Orwell and Six Feet Under, and leave it at that.

I plan to go into Oxford city later this week to go to Blackwell's Music and see what I can get. NEAW may also be taking me to the organ at Trinity College, to which I am thinking of applying in a few years' time. I went in to town last week with Stuart. Visiting the modern art gallery, and meeting Stuart's arty friend, reminded me how much I miss the freedom of drawing and painting, and the profound satisfaction it used to give me. It has reminded me that many of the therapeutic activities that used to exist in my life - art, music, sport - have either disappeared or become a burden more than an escape. Next year I think I will try at least to get back to my drawing and painting and see if it does me some good.

I have realised today that last summer I was keeping my personal (handwritten) journal more keenly than ever at this time last year. At the moment, I am not keeping it at all, really, beside a few occasional scribblings of ideas, such as these:

In that difficult time between tea and supper, Anne would send seventy year-old Bruce to play with his train set.

73,884 killed in Nagasaki 9.8.1945

In this land of happiness,
Rare and always fleeting,
Rain is a drug concealed in droplets,
And love is every meeting.

So too I realise that there are a great many things that I do not write down these days, because this website is too public an affair to record the more tentative thoughts that run through my head. I am too concerned with who precisely is reading, what precisely they are thinking, and more specifically how they are thinking of me. It is a question of keeping my image up, and I suppose ultimately this journal's only purpose is to make people like me, or continue to. That is a very different purpose from the one that I feel tonight I need to fulfil. I remember sitting topless last summer on a balcony in Cornwall (was it Cornwall?) while the others were away. I had my notebook and I was writing about bees, I was writing letters to people that I never intended to send, I was drawing things in order to remember them. I was making notes for a book I have not written and probably never will. Where is the room for that here? I have discussed this before, but not in quite the same vein of frustration. Surely even in my personal (handwritten) journals I am writing to an audience, as I have said. But nevertheless I feel freer to write certain things. I suppose it is control; I can control who reads those things. But certainly there are people that I expect, intend or accept will at some point read them, less because of themselves, but rather because of me; because ultimately I fight a battle between wanting people to know me and wanting nobody to know who I really am.

Bobby McFerran
Don't worry, be happy

I have not finished, but I have paused. I am a million miles away from last summer and there is no question that you could ask that would make me say I want to be back in the situation I was in then. Nevertheless I miss some of the thoughts and dreams I had then that, if I still have now, at least feel a lot further away. I miss the love of the sunshine, of the warmth. I miss the dream of walking hand in hand with HW in a sunset on the beach, accompanied by cigarettes and red wine. I miss having these fantasies. I resent the fact that I have become more practical, however slight that change may be considered; I resent the fact that I have changed, despite knowing how sorely I wanted and needed to change before I changed.

Most of all I am annoyed by the fact that the most significant moments in my development, in my thoughts and in my life are the ones that both I and other dismiss most readily as anomalous, wrong and insignificant. I am annoyed that entries like this, which will be psychologically struck through after the moment has passed, represent more of who I am than any of my moments of happiness and calmness. Because only in times like this do I feel like I know myself. What am I saying? What mood do you believe me to be in? In case you are wondering, I am not, in fact, downbeat or depressed. I am not even sad. I am just different at this particular point in time. I feel like I am myself for the first time in weeks, months, or perhaps years. In fact, I am not sure when I last felt like myself. I feel most myself when I am with myself, when I am with my thoughts, with my own words. So whatever you read at the moment is what has been poured out in a desperate attempt to record a piece of myself before I sleep, and awake again into a state where I feel like I am hovering a few centimetres above myself.

This is, incidentally, no cause for concern. Because I'll have you know that I actually have Elton John's Greatest Hits playing in iTunes, and that I am perfectly aware of how this is coming across. After all, this is the point of this journal. It is to come across, to promote an image, yes? So how do you know that what I have just filled a side of A4 with is not totally different from this? If you know me maybe you will say that there is no great disparity between the two, because you know that I get like this, though I have just said that I am actually not like anything, or at least I am not like anything that I have been recently. What image do you have now? Draw it on the wall, and I will go back to thinking about what my dreams meant, because I think that they may mark a very important turnaround in my understanding. I will turn around to do precisely that same thing tomorrow as I would have done anyway.

Saturday was Leicester Gay & Lesbian Pride day. BN, a canon at Leicester Cathedral, was to be seen in full ecclesiastical garb waving his purple flag on the back of a float populated by drag acts and old women wearing fruit bowls on their head. The march held up most of Leicester's traffic and Bible-bashing Evangelical Christians were satisfyingly suppressed. BN eventually had to change out of his dog collar because most people did not accredit him with actually being a priest, but more frequently believed him to be in fancy dress designed to mock the church. I suppose this is not so far from the truth.

Later that day I was invited to go with DW to a play at Leicester's Guildhall, one of the city's oldest surviving buildings. With an audience of only around thirty, I felt quite privileged to be there to see what was quite a forward-thinking, intelligent and conceptual piece of theatre. No-one was entirely sure when the play started; the actors mingled with the audience in pre-performance drinks and popcorn, nuts and olives. The choice of food was to give a prelude to the play's comments on cultural assimilation: much of this point was indeed to be communicated in the form of food. Sat around a large table, in what was indeed an old banquet hall, we were still in the dark, both figuratively and literally. The windows had been blacked out to give greatest effect to the very well though out lighting, and we still had no idea who were the actors. Was the woman next to me an actor? We were tempted to make assumptions and to be cagey about the person next to us.

You may have guessed by now that the play, called EatEat, centres around asylum, refugees and immigration, which are hot issues not only nationally but even more so locally. Leicester is (unofficially) acknowledged to be the first city in the country where immigrant population and their descendants outnumber native-line citizens. This statistic has in the past prompted the police to go to great lengths to cover up racial tensions, and even riots which took place on St Matthew's estate around the same time as the Oldham and Bradford riots two years ago.

The play was to take the following form: A five course meal, during which we would be served dishes from, among others, Iran, Iraq, Zambia and Leicester. The most striking and symbolic part of the play for me was the opening; a scene called The Swimmer, where, totally unexpectedly, a man emerges, wet, from the middle of the table. He looks around, slowly, tentatively, at the diners sat around the table (who are, incidentally, of many different races and classes), all of whom, inevitably, are staring at him, thinking, and judging. He retreats below the table, all is as it was before, and we resume our conversations. Another highlight was an East European woman dancing in her native style to Britney Spears' Baby one more time. The actors in the play were indeed asylum seekers themselves at one time or another, and most of them now live in Leicester. There were numerous other points to draw from the play, but suffice to say for now that it was greatly insightful and succeeded in making me look at the asylum situation in a different way. It reminded us that (to paraphrase) those who live on an island believe it to be the whole world, but that we are all from islands of one sort or another, and that each is certainly not the whole world. The play concluded with a quote from a Conservative MP in 1852 (!), and, to paraphrase again: It is a great thing for Britain to be able to welcome in a refugee and give him safety. It shows how much we have moved on in our thinking. EatEat is still playing and I'll try to put details up if I can find them out.

I'm on a train to Oxford to stay with Stuart for the week. I've just had to wait an hour and twenty minutes on Coventry station platform; it is a good job that the train finally came, just before I lost the will to live.

Tags: gay, gaypride, leicester, march, cathedral, guildhall

So it lasted five days; and now I've had enough. Being here is grinding me down. The things which used to annoy me before are annoying me anew, and I just want to get home to Manchester so I can feel better again. In my fingertips and in my head I feel the dull nausea of being confined in a place I have wanted to get away from for years. I wonder if I will stay away once I'm back: I see less and less to be gained by anyone in my return. It feels like all the effort I have spent building myself up is being systematically undone, like a ball of wool being inevitably kicked down a staircase. If I come back each summer I will feel like Sisyphus, doomed to begin pushing his boulder up his hill time and time again. It hurts my head. Never do I want to hurt anyone, never do I want to put anyone in an unnecessarily unhappy position. But this is the only place that does this to me; this is the only place where the same things happen, and the same things get to me. Sometimes not every problem has an amicable solution.

My brother now wears a baseball cap with two profile pictures of a penguin on the front, with a caption reading: PENGUIN, M. E. (Moderately Evil).

On my way home last night, there was a sign in my driver's taxi:

Your taxi driver's dream: Not to be stereotyped.

Tags: taxi, stereotype, leicester

Things get more and more like Orwell's 1984, and people know it. It is almost incredible that benefit fraud is being tackled with publicity along the lines of "We're watching you" and "We can follow your movements" printed on bus shelter posters. Walking around Leicester today I will have been filmed on hundreds of cameras; there is information on me, along with everyone else, stored in databases I don't even know exist and would have to go to great financial and legal lengths to get access to, let alone have removed. So what's wrong with this? This is just for our safety, right?

I am often accused of being idealist. Live in the real world, I am told, deal with things practically, stop spouting ideology. It is as though ideology has no place, and never has. When did this happen? Is it not true that every society in the world draws its codes and laws from social or religious ideology?

Spending millions of pounds on hundreds of thousands of cameras up and down the country is not positive. It does society no good. So what if it reduces crime, statistically? Is that all we care about these days? Orwell warned us that 1984 was the way the world was heading, and that in this new world our only emotions would be fearful. So what about the drawbacks of installing cameras? For to suggest there are none would be thoroughly erroneous. It cannot be denied that, as necessary as some may believe it to be, this policy represents the addressing of the symptoms of a problem, rather than the tackling of its causes. The majority of serious crime is committed through need or addiction. It is committed by those in the underclass who need money. To tell them that, however desperate their situation, they should not commit crime is laughable. Why? It is idealistic! It is easy enough for us comfortable middle class to say they should not to support themselves through crime, but in their shoes I suspect our conscience would not be quite so prominent. The hungry stomach knows no law. So if crime is increasing, it is because our underclass is becoming increasingly alienated under recent government.

Cameras as a method of crime prevention is designed to promote fear: it is inherent in its chances of success. But the fear it creates is not limited to serious criminals, or even those who commit less serious offences; it stirs up an atmosphere of fear and police superiority across the whole of our society, and we all suffer. It promotes a two-tier society, where a message is sent to those who commit crime that we do not care about why they do it; that we just want them to go away. It undermines the first principle of our judicial system. Anyone who tells me that this route is a satisfactory way for our communities to operate is living in an idealist's dreamland, and it will achieve absolutely nothing.

Tags: orwell, georgeorwell, 1984, fear, cameras, cctv

It is a beautiful day in the Pennines as we wind our way south, through the outskirts of Manchester and out into the breathtaking valleys gouged from the landscape. The sun is piercing through the haze high in the sky and everything feels alive. The carriage on my train is nearly full. Everyone's voices are full of hope and colour.

So choir is finished, for a few weeks at least. I will be coming back to Manchester in mid-July. Believe it or not, I am looking forward to going home and being able to twiddle on my piano, walk around the streets that I could walk with my eyes closed. Go back to the same shops I was wandering round this time last year, the same cafes, and sit on the same benches. But this time last year I was fantasising, wondering what was still to come. This year I am stronger and more assured. What will it be like now? I don't know. But I suspect everything will be just the same as ever, and perhaps now that is a good thing, a happy thing.

I cannot take this heat! It was 30 degrees here in Leicester during the day and it is still too hot now. Anyway, I got here. I chatted to a theatre producer on the train about the Contact in Manchester, music, and a general assortment of polite topics. He seemed like a nice guy, so we swapped numbers and I told him to let me know if he's in Manchester again. Their show seemed to get good reviews.

I was met off the train by my two-strong crew, and after taking my bags home I slipped back into Leicester routine and voyaged to the cathedral. Although everything was different, by chance of circumstances - it was Eucharist, not Evensong; there was no organ; there was one voice to a part - it felt just the same as ever. There were the same dotty churchwardens talking too loudly, in many ways like a primary school teacher. Then there were the same, extravagantly camp Anglican priests, and then David - because the distinction is necessary - in his shiny new fcuk glasses ;) . He preached a masterfully polished and balanced sermon and I'm very proud of him. I've seen the quality of ordinands that preach at Manchester Cathedral, and their timidity and lack of passion means that there is no comparison. We had dinner at ASK, ran off to the Rainbow and Dove, where he had four double G&Ts (!) and then wheeled himself off home. I met up with LZ for a game of pool, and then we lazed about on the grass in Town Hall Square. It has been good to catch up because everything is the same, it seems, except me. I feel different. I feel like I have moved on from my past now, and that I am someone new. Someone more confident, someone stronger, and someone who wants the independence he's learnt up north. In some ways I feel like who I have been in the past is hanging over me a little. I want to say goodbye to me of old, but by no means do I want to say goodbye to all the things and people that I love here; quite the reverse. I don't know how I can reconcile the two other than to say that I realise no-one will ever know me absolutely, or understand everything I do, because there is no unified 'me'; I feel and act differently in different circumstances. I am different people at different times. And I suppose everyone is the same. Sometimes I think I love some people too much for me to understand. Sometimes I feel love so strong that I melt away like chocolate and feel that I could never return. Sometimes love means so much that I just don't know what to do.

Tags: leicester, leicestercathedral, home, train, weather, tagname

Lots to do this summer. I want to write some piano pieces, learn lots of organ music, and travel around a bit. I am looking forward to going to France for a week to see LZ, and then I have two singing trips to Liverpool Cathedral and a concert tour in Dorset. I am beginning to feel my confidence increasing. I hope this will be a good holiday.

It is beginning to hit me that the first year really is over. Most of the rooms around are empty now. In two days I will be home, too. I just can't believe that it's passed so quickly, but in the same moment it feels like the beginning of the year was a million years ago. I am happy today, even though I'm sad about leaving my room, which has become my first truly personal space. So much has changed; I feel like I started the year off very young, but now I feel very much more safe and independent. It took a little time. I am on a course I want to be doing, and the memories of taking the bus to UMIST are but a faint and distant memory. So today I will get a haircut, clean the flat, and go out for dinner with Stuart. Bye bye Whitworth Park!

I have just got back from dropping all my gear off at PC's house. Michael is leaving today, Dave's just gone, and there's cars all over the place. It's all over! This has been a very positive year and I've matured a lot, I think. But there's still more to do before Stuart's Road Map to Mental Health is complete.

For some reason I have left a bottle of Bailey's in my room, so I suppose I'll have to drink it or something.

The walls of my room are bare and the first year is in a shoe box. I am slowly packing things into crates and boxes before taking them to someone's house tomorrow, to be left over the summer. It is an operation akin to archaeology: the deeper I dig in my drawers, the further back the memories go. I have found all the freshers' week adverts in a heap in the back of my wardrobe.

The posters in the common room have come down and gradually the room is looking like it did when we first arrived: anonymous, blanched, and empty. On the walls there now remain only two things: a makeshift nativity made from the characters of Winnie the Pooh, and a parody sign from the most active period in flat politics. It reads:

Lounge Rules

1. Above all, NO PARODY SIGNS.
2. Respect the Authorita.
3. No pissing on the telly.
4. Fines will be levied for disparaging the sign.

The rooms around mine are gradually emptying. That is, the ones I can see, for I am still bleary-eyed after being persuaded to frequent the last Club Trop. Unfortunately, this caused me to drink 350ml of vodka and gin, not in the same glass. Both are very cheap, subhuman, generic brands probably emanating from Russia under the auspices of the title Rachmaninov. I was pissed. Very. This resulted in:

• Dancing like a fool;
• Smoking four, scrounged cigarettes, one of which I acquired through sending a smoking friend on a mission to a stranger;
• Eating scrounged chips with curry sauce;
• Lying on the grassy knoll in Whitworth Park;
• Talking loudly at strangers;
• Excessive fondling of Stuart in Club Tropicana;
• Being sick four times in a bucket.

Today I feel ill.

1. Location: Tesco Express, Oxford Road. Today, Stuart and I were doing some general shopping both for ourselves and others. Having got to the till, everything was scanned. Stuart gave £3.20 of vouchers, his clubcard and credit card, but upon swiping, the computer failed to produce a slip for signing. After calling her supervisor, the cashier decided she would have to rescan the lot. This caused the following problems: a) The coupons had by now been filed safely in the till; b) A label to the effect of reducing a packet of cheese and onion sandwiches from £1.19 to 59p had been removed and disposed of. I resolved the latter by pointing the problem out, but she was forced to call her supervisor for a second time when dealing with the coupons issue. They were entered manually, and finally the transaction was complete.

2. Location: Tesco Express, Oxford Road. Some time ago, I was making a small shopping excursion. I was in a particularly good mood so was sociable and chatty with the cashier. I paid by card, and he managed to tear the receipt in half so that I was in fact signing a shred of paper which contained no details about either the transaction or my card. Furthermore, the machine chewed up the rest of the receipt. It took him a little while to unjam it, and I was finally given about half of my receipt, with a chasm of torn white space at the top of the sheet. On my way home, I was accosted by a woman leaving the selfsame Tesco Express, informing me that "someone" had left their card behind. I was nearly home, and so was thoroughly embittered at having to return to collect my card. I took it and stormed off home, heart pounding, brow sweating, anger levels moving into the red.

3. Location: Tesco Express, Oxford Road. The choice in the chilled food section almost caused me to have an irrational panic attack, and I was forced to walk round in circles with my basket to calm myself.

4. Location: Sainsbury's Local, Oxford Street. Having reached the till with my typically small amount of shopping, I thought that I noticed an item go through on the till which I had not purchased. I was not sure, so resolved to reconcile the matter when presented with the receipt. However, upon completion of the transaction, such an item-by-item receipt was not provided, and I was informed that the opportunity to acquire one was now passed! I totalled up what I had bought when I returned home to find that I had indeed been overcharged. I wrote to the company but have not received a reply after four weeks. The battle against my supermarket curse continues.

Tags: tesco, sainsburys, mundane, incidents, accidents, humour

While listening to some strange electronica on late-night Radio 3, I am trying to decide whether to buy Radiohead's new album tomorrow. I have a week left here until I go home. I suppose I will do some organ practice, some theory, read some things, and generally chill out. It feels good that exams have finished, and I've enjoyed going out the last few nights. I met a boy in Baa Baa last night but he disappeared. I managed to skank many free shooters from the bar and allowed myself to be first on the dance floor, and start bangin' da rip groov' moves. It was fun.

Earlier I had gone to the Chinese restaurant, a visit during which I decided that I particularly like the egg-fried rice that they serve. There were two deaf women in there, and a twelve-strong group of crazy Afro-Caribbeans. It, also, was fun.

Tags: radiohead, album, baabaa, manchester, chinese, restaurant

What about cultural crossover? How far can a culture be generalised and said to 'exist' in this way?

The problem of stereotyping and generalisation is pertinent to the terms of the debate, because in the Mediterranaean society and in many societies of the time it was normal to operate on group and national stereotypes: this was the way things work, and it was not a system which carried negative connotations. Assuming that we can speak of cultures with some reasonable degree of accurate representation, though, it is fair to say that great challenges are presented to a society when another culture is encountered. Malina says this on the subject:

Cultures are selective, limited, and limiting. So every culture eventually has to confront experiences that defy its cues, that do not measure up to its assumptions or classifications. Our culture, for example, cues us to perceive other human beings as individualistic personalities, while our first-century foreigners were cued to perceive others as group-oriented collectivistic personalities. What happens when one culture is confronted with the other's prevalent personality type?

...What I am driving at is that cultures have to deal with realities that do not fit their cues, and every culture eventually faces a greater or lesser number of such realities. These experiences that do not fit socially shared patterns or norms are called anomalies... If we are enculturated to react with strong negative feelings toward certain anomalies, to view them as triggers of disgust or hate, we would call this class of anomalies abominations.

Of course, the crossing of cultures is as ubiquitous and inevitable as the existence of cultures themselves. They have been meeting for tens of thousands of years and struggling to reconcile their differences. We can take from Malina the important point that no culture is total, complete - rather it is, as he says, selective, limited, and limiting.

So then, the next problem: to appreciate this conundrum at all requires, effectively, to be divorced, or in some way set above, one's own culture, and those cultures with which one is dealing. I conceded yesterday that I think this is largely impossible because of how deep our cultural influences are upon us. This leaves open the way for the argument that cultural relativism itself has become part of our culture, for it is certainly not part of many other cultures. The notion of anything but absolute morality to many religions would be an anathema. Furthermore, can we really be claiming to be occupying some objective, newly-insightful point of view when talking of relativism? Are we not really just introducing a whole new set of absolutes? One of our new absolutes is that all cultures are absolutely relatively defined. How does this differ? For indeed, we cannot, I think, step back far enough to get beyond any level of absolutism whatsoever.

But this type of discussion does not move anything on practically. Are we willing to concede that, yes, we have an unknown number of assumptions that we cannot lose, but that we are happy to forget about these and take a pragmatic stance based on what we think we understand about the way cultures work? This is the only way forward, I feel, but we continue to run the risk of working on as many principles we consider absolute as any other world.

Returning to Bruce Malina's New Testament World in the course of my revision, I am reminded how relevant many of his observations are. The book is an anthropological search of the culture of the Mediterranaean world around the time of the first post-Jesus groups. His most pertinent points on cultural difference relate to: the individual and the group, purity and pollution, honour and shame, and limited good. Malina points out that our (Western) society operates on individualist assumptions:

Have you ever noticed how few people bother to read any first-century Mediterranaean writings apart from the New Testament? By our standards, first-century Mediterranaean writings are generally boring. Perhaps the main reason for this is that the center of concern in those writings is not ours. For whenever we start to discuss some gossip, some person, or some social problem, almost invariably and inevitably our conversation takes on psychological undertones. We adopt a point of view that is psychological. In our culture, we tend to consider a person's psychological makeup, his or her personality development from infancy on, as well as his or her individuality and uniqueness (personal reasons) as perhaps the most important elements in understanding and explaining human behavior, both our own and that of others. Yet if you carefully read the New Testament writings or any other writing from the same period, you will find an almost total absence of such information. One obvious reason for this state of affairs is that the people described in the new Testament, as well as those who described them, were not interested in or concerned about psychological or personality information. Otherwise we should find as much of such information in those writings as we might in a modern biography, novel, or newspaper. Since this kind of information is lacking, you might conclude that the first-century Mediterranaean person did not share or comprehend our idea of an "individual" at all. And I believe you would be right.

Instead of individualism, what we find in the first-century Mediterranaean world is what might be called collectivism. Persons always considered themselves in terms of the group(s) in which they experienced themselves as inextricably embedded. Collectivistic personality is characteristic of individuals who perceive themselves and form their self-image in terms of what others perceive and feed back to them.

Malina goes into much deeper detail, but we get the idea. This raises various questions, though there will be one towards which I am ultimately aiming.

Does this talk not suggest that their society was primitive because they didn't understand psychology?

I hope that this quotation from Malina does not by any rate imply that ancient Mediterranaen collectivism is in any way primitive. Their lack of concern with individual psychology of personality is not a sign of weakness or deficiency in knowledge. This is an important point to make, since our Western culture frequently assumes that more knowledge represents a higher level of existence, and superiority over other cultures. To say that Mediterranaen society was unconcerned with individual psychology is not to say that it did not recognise it, even if in different terms; because emotion and frame of mind are certainly described, just infrequently and often in reference to an entire group.

One other area of particular importance is Malina's exploration of limited and limitless good:

...extensive areas of behavior are patterned in such a way as to suggest to one and all that in society as well as in nature - the total environment - all the desired things in life, such as land, wealth, prestige, blood, health, semen, friendship and love, manliness, honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety - literally all goods in life - exist in finite, limited quantity and are always in short supply.

Further, not only is it obvious that all conceivable good things in life are finite in number and limited in quantity, but it is equally apparent that there is no way directly within a person's power to increase the available quantities. It is much as though the obvious fact of land shortage and/or housing opportunities in a densely populated area applied to all other desired things in life: simply not enough to go around. Since all good exists in limited amounts that cannot be increased or expanded, it follows that individuals, alone or with their families, can improve their social positions only at the expense of others.

(Emphasis added.) This is to be contrasted with the West, and particularly North America, whose culture is now very much based on limitless good. The American free enterprise system assumes that it is possible for everyone to prosper through hard work, as though there were an unlimited amount of wealth and goods to go round. To the Mediterranaean citizen, though, anyone who sought more wealth than he or she needed would have been positively dishonourable, and seen as greedy, and therefore damaging. Less important than these points in themselves, which are fairly self-evident, is how far we are actually able to understand them. Can we know what it is like to live life according to a group identity? Can we know what it is like to exist is a society which assumes that individual accumulation of wealth is utterly odorous?

Do you have any answers to these questions?

I think that we can never step out of our own cultural bracket. We can never become an insider in another world.

But can we go any way towards it?

I think that we should start off with no assumptions, as far as possible. Imagine that there is nothing absolute which is common of cultural world (a) and cultural world (b). Starting from nothing, we can consider how far our cultures are similar.

How about biology? Surely we all have our bodies in common?

I think we are safe to assume that our bodies work in roughly the same way from culture to culture. Yes, we all feel pain, we all feel pleasure, we all smile. But even this is not as straightforward as we might like to think. Pain has different meaning in different cultural worlds. In the West it is largely frowned upon and is associated with such things as evil, vampirism and devil-worship! We strive for pleasure alone, and only the most respectable forms of it at that. In Sri Lanka, though, pain is experienced differently and carries different cultural baggage. Men and women walk across burning coals in a display of asceticism towards the gods. One man, from the film about the Kataragama festival, hangs from hooks once a year after a promise he made to one of the gods. Pain is not dishonourable. Similarly, pleasure carries different baggage. Prostitution is frowned upon in the West - it is immoral, it is unhygienic, and undermines the family. But much ancient near eastern religion of the last 5000 years has seen temple prostitutes offering their bodies to men for the worship of the gods.

So even at this early stage we have come to a halt?

It is not a halt, but it should illustrate just how fundamentally different cultures are. Even our biological functions are considered differently everywhere we go, though the physical sensations may be similar.

So anyway, why is this important? Surely we don't really need to know about other cultures anyway, it's just academic curiosity.

This is utterly relevant to today's world situation. Recent wars have been driven by moral arguments based on the assumption that our Western values can be exported to other cultures, and that it is appropriate to universalise them in this way. Breaking the Taleban in Afghanistan assumed that, because the regime's values were disagreeable to us, they were also inappropriate for that culture. We wanted to 'liberate' women, allow people to listen to music, and free up international trade. But imagine that the Tali'ban were the world power the size of the U. S.. They would argue invasion on moral grounds to rid the U. S. of its awful regime, which allowed women to walk around without a veil, and allowed all sorts of secular music. If the U. S. were invaded and rid of its values, would it be happy?

But come, on, surely you're missing the point. The point, after all, is that we are promoting freedom and freedom is an objectively wonderful thing!

Objectively? Freedom is a distinctly Western idea, and it is not what an awful lot of the world either wants or is accustomed to. Peter Oborne's Channel 4 documentary Here's one we invaded earlier showed that since the Afghanistan war has calmed down, the efforts to impose a Westernised democracy on the country have failed, and it has, of its own accord, moved back towards the kind of society that it was before. It is a medieval world of kings and kingdoms, and that is not a negative thing.

But surely, if you take this relativism to extremes, you can justify all sorts of things. What if we had not acted in Nazi Germany? Surely those sensations of pain, torture and death are not concepts that can be relativised?

These are good points, because they raise questions about the context of these situations, which is what I want to deal with. Relativism is not a way of escaping morality or meaning. Rather, by abandoning our absolute ideas, we are opening ourselves up to the full range of meaning on show around the earth. There is perhaps another way, though. So far, we have attempted to make moral arguments on the basis of our own values. Accepting that this is inappropriate does not mean that our thoughts end, and we wash our hands of the entire situation; on the contrary, it just demands a different approach.

We come back to the question of whether we can sufficiently understand the values of another society. How far can we become insiders? I concede that we can never become insiders, but we can go some way towards it. The first stage is to accept that we will never fully understand another culture, which should help to establish a little humility in this regard, and therefore moderate our actions a little. We can assess how the events in any particular country or culture are being perceived and reacted to by those within that society. And so my final point: this requires not bombing as a first resort. War of this type is an acknowledgement that we do not understand the situation, and have not attempted to. Overriding diplomacy, talking, discussion, on the other hand, can give us this understanding and then whether or not we act militarily can be gauged much more accurately. Only by watching a situation, talking to those within it, assessing how appropriate the situation is for the society it occupies, can we ever hope to do the good, or best, thing. Naziism was a situation which did not fit the culture it developed in. It was right to remove it, though it could have been done without a war the scale of WWII had there been the sort of diplomatic structures that I am talking about in place. It could have been recognised long before 1939 that Naziism had no place in its social setting. On the other hand, Afghanistan was a completely different question. The Taleban did fit the society it existed in to a much greater degree.

Tags: malina, brucemalina, newtestament, world, cultural, relativism

There is a man we see walking around the streets here who looks like Einstein. He is mad, presumably homeless, presumably alcoholic. He can be seen to wander the pavements of Oxford Road, jumping forward without warning and pointing as though to a small ghoul between the slabs. This is where the similarity with Einstein ends. Nevertheless, he is nicknamed 'Irish Einstein'; Irish being added due to his apparent geographical derivation.

A list of first year memories, in order of nothing:

• Not knowing what to do with myself for two days;
• Freshers' Week sex;
• Too much cheap red wine;
• Losing five chairs;
• Grand Theft Auto 3;
• Grand Theft Auto Vice City;
• Kitchen politics;
• Bathroom politics;
• Common room politics;
• Chinese buffet;
• Christmas carol service;
• Harry's Bar;
• Failure at UMIST;
• LGB;
• Happy change to Theology;
• Pasta;
• Luigi;
• Stuart's birthday;
• The gradual failure of my PC and mouse;
• Scholarship, and money;
• Having too little money;
• Spending too much money;
• Buying an iBook;
• Snowball fight;
• The Whitworth Gallery thefts;
• New friends;
• Trips to Leicester, Oxford, Leeds, Leicester, Leeds, Oxford, Leicester, Bangor, Sheffield, London;
• The anti-war demos;
• Praying that I'm not a unrespectable stereotype of a student;
• Being an unrespectable stereotype of a student;
• Kro Bar;
• Kro 2;
• Banana Bread Beer;
• Turning the lounge upside down;
• The Haikus;
• Masturbation;
• Less and fewer;
• Michael building forts;
• Broken window;
• Klepto breaking his finger;
• Klepto slashing his hand open;
• Klepto's other near-death experiences;
• My room;
• Reduced newspapers;
• Learning how to smile;
• Writing a list.