ThePress
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Friday August 15, 2015
This star makes sense of our universal puzzle LIKE Professor Brian Cox, the astro-physicist with the movie star looks and the schoolboy charm, over whom a million middleaged housewives swoon at the very mention of his Large Hadron Collider. I was musing on the Prof’s popularity late on Wednesday evening, having followed all the appropriate advice for getting the best view of the spectacular Perseid meteor shower. I positioned my chair in a dark part of the garden and lay back (which made sipping my vino a tad awkward), stargazing in the general direction of the constellation Cassiopaea. Whatever else stuck with me from long ago evenings at the 2nd Thornhill Cubs and our meetings at the old Combs School, the instant recognition of Orion, the Plough, Cassiopaea and their astral friends certainly did. If contemplation is good for the soul, then enjoying peace and solitude under the stars magnifies it tenfold. And in our neck of the woods at least
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Prof Brian Cox – a nice guy who talks sense
Not quite the view from my back garden on Wednesday...
on Wednesday night, we struck lucky – clear skies. Well I say ‘clear’. I was reminded of nights high in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains where an old friend bought an entire abandoned silver mining town for just $60,000, and a gang of us went up to make it habitable. Another time, laying in the back of a pickup truck driving across a Mexican desert late at night, the jewelled skies felt like they were so close you could reach out and touch them. It was actually difficult to pick out constella-
tions because the night sky, in total blackness with not a town, city or street light for 50 or 100 miles, was dazzling, crammed with stars. At times like that you really do contemplate man’s minuscule significance in and amongst the vast expanse of the universe. Still, our own modest Wednesday night light show was a good excuse to muse upon the meaning of life. I missed the International Space Station going by a little after 10.30pm, but it was clear enough that I did see three
LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE Danny Lockwood man-made satellites passing high above over the next hour or so. I counted seven streaking meteors in that time, flaring and burning out in a flash, before I called it a night. It struck me that, unlike many – most? – scientists, Brian Cox doesn’t feel the need to ridicule people of faith; people who look to the heavens and fathom no explanation other than that an Almighty being, beyond our insignificant human comprehension, must have fashioned this staggering creation. THINK I understand the Big Bang theory, the 21st century scientists’ bible, which so many of them feel is a simple punctuation point with which to halt the faith argument. Cox doesn’t. He asks questions, seeks answers and invites debate. I sense that if you asked him, okay, who ‘Created’ the Big Bang clever clogs? he’d shrug his shoulders and smile that twinkly-eyed, million-dollar smile of his, rather than batter you over the head with
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a particle physics thesis that would close the door on conversation. I believe in God. I haven’t always. I don’t think he has a flowing beard and a set of Pearly Gates with a queue outside. I certainly don’t think he’s the God of anyone who massacres innocent people supposedly in his name. I wish we’d all get along better, be happy to give more, take less, tolerate different beliefs and not feel the need
to impose ours. I actually wish we could vote for Brian Cox for Prime Minister. But in the absence of all that, and despite promising myself more moments of splendid contemplation like Wednesday night, in the meantime good men and women need to keep resisting the lesser humans in our midst who would destroy our very right to sip a red wine and to believe in anything different from them.
GOT right to the very end of filling in my Labour Party registration form, which would have entitled me to take part in the upcoming leadership election, before I had second thoughts and cancelled it. The sense of mischief appealed, I confess – of turning Labour’s naïve politicking stunt on its head. They deserve Jeremy Corbyn, if only for that foolishness. But I haven’t supported Labour’s ways and means for many years and it would be wrong to abuse the process now – even if it was asking for it. But here’s the thing. If I was a Labour supporter in the party’s truest tradition, then I would vote for Jeremy Corbyn. At the very least he is what it says on his tin, unlike the other shallow, power-hungry careerists, Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and, to a lesser extent perhaps, Liz Kendall. But it’s a party I’m not invited to, so I won’t gatecrash. May the most honest man or woman win.
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CAN’T recall exactly when As Camila shut up shop, I first cast eyes on Camila employees were allegedly told Batmanjelly, the walking, to delete and wipe their email talking flower display claimrecords. In a charity? Really? ing to save England’s downAgain, wouldn’t you try to trodden children from its safeguard the kids first, as nefarious, vice-ridden ways. opposed to acting like Richard I can tell you that from the Nixon when Watergate broke? moment she opened her florid But that’s noticeable too. I mouth, pranced around TV haven’t seen or heard a single studios and celebrity funcchild client breaking down in tions fluttering her Pantodesperate tears for the camdame eyelashes at the great eras. and the gullible like a cross And yet with the BBC’s between Dawn French’s Vicar arch-luvvie Alan Yentob as of Dibley and an explosion in the charity’s chairman, you a blancmange factory, my can bet they’ve been desperinstincts screamed ‘dodgy!’ ately trying to find some. Camila Batmanghelidjh Those instincts may prove As the tale unfolds I don’t wildly unfounded. We shall see. doubt that, with rising hysteria, old splendifBut from that moment, 15 or so years ago, erous Batmanjelly will howl at the injustice right to this past week when she hurriedly of it all. The race card will probably be played collapsed the Kids Company charity, I would- at some stage. n’t have trusted her as far as I could throw a Maybe that’s been her problem all along – live hand grenade at Tony Blair. the bright lights of London. The awards and It’s now emerging that staff at Kids accolades and celebrity profile. Company were told to shred files on their She was the pastel moth, fluttering around ‘clients’ – ie, troubled, vulnerable children. the bright burning halos of the high and This allegedly happened in the days and mighty, who were all too happy to rub shoulhours after Batmanjelly twisted ministers’ ders and milk the feelgood factor – until the arms up their backs for a £3m bailout, much inconvenient truth started leaking out. of which was promptly spent before a dramatLots of Islington Tristans and Tabithas, livic winding up of the charity. ing it large on other people’s cash, but with But shredding files? If the kids are the ones very few changed lives to show for it, because who matter, wouldn’t you put their care first? in true ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ style it wasLook for someone else to take them on? n’t fashionable to ask difficult questions. Maybe not, because Kids Company’s main It’s very much a parable for what this counproblem seems to have been that there were try has become. more staff (a reported 650) than kids. If only Camila Batmanghelidjh had based A recent report by a Times journalist who her charity at the Taleem Training and visited Batwoman’s swish London HQ strug- Community Centre in Savile Town, she’d gled to spot many children among the teem- probably still be soaking up money from all ing, hipster staff sipping a skinny latte and and sundry. munching on a bean sprout salad. Their raft of community groups got away Local authorities say they hardly expect to with financial murder for years until they be inundated with displaced ‘victims’. That were exposed, with both the National Lottery speaks volumes. and Kirklees Council complicit in covering In their latest published accounts for 2013, up their own parts in the process. of Kids Company’s £21.5m income, around But then again I guess that dressing up like £14m was spent on staff. And the charity is Coco the Clown, as Camila did, was always a for whose benefit, exactly? And that wage bill riskier tactic than taking people for fools was 25% up on the previous year alone. while hiding modestly behind a Zorro outfit.
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