The radiator overflow, disconnected. Main top cap off. Then I drained the coolant, using the plug at the bottom. Did’nae photograph that though.
Disconnecting the main radiator pipe. Turned the radiator clips through 180°.
Ditto the right radiator clip.
Removing the main hose in the front engine area. What’s this one called/for?
Popped this thinner tube out of a plastic clip.
Disconnected the right end of the large tube. Popped it in the passenger seat. This clip was a real mother! I might want to replace it with a different sort, when it comes time to reassemble things.
Popping off another of the simpler smaller tubes.
A lead that runs to the fan clips in place behind said fan. There are one or two plastic doodads that clip into a plate at the front.
And, lastly, removing a larger pipe from the bottom of the radiator, and draining more coolant! This pipe isn’t in the best condition. And the clip holding it in place is even worse. If the car can be brought back to life, these parts are prime candidates for upgrading.
Just a general shot, trying to keep track of engine layout. The bar along the bottom of this shot is called a ‘sway bar’, and keeps the front wheels in proper torsion and alignment. The silvery doodad in the centre is the thermostat housing. Two thin pipes go into this, one to the right, the other directly below.
With the radiator out, and the biggest of the pipes removed, it starts looking a bit more spacious up front. This extra space should be great for working at the the front of the engine. Which I’ll be getting to later, hopefully.
Zooming in a bit. Look at all the electrical leads/cabling (and adaptors/connectors!), and the several sundry pipes. Lots to keep track of!
Clips and leads on the air filter.
I wanted to capture a general view of the engine as seen from below, under the car. Cool! As can be seen, the sway bar will be in the way of loosening the bottom wheel.
Right side of the air filter. Or is that the left side?
Umm… getting confused. Where is this!? Is this the left or right of the air filter, and adjoining wiring.
A broken clip, and a tricky one. The second being the off white one, to the right of the broken black plastic ring. Can’t recall how I got that one out!?
The same as the above, with the tricky clip out, and the broken one more clearly visible.
Numerous electrical connections had these weird sprung clips. They’re tricky to pop out. I used pliers to squeeze them together, which helped.
Some of the hoses and hose clips were pretty stubborn. BTW, the red jack stand, visible under the ‘sway bar’, supports the latter, which I needed to loosen up, so it wouldn’t be in my way.
Thought it’d be easier to remove the above wiring, as pictured, i.e. still attached to the clip.
More photos of parts of the wiring loom.
Removing another chunky coolant pipe. Note that there are markings on the pipe which align with little nodules on the metal piping.
Can’t recall why I photographed this nut? Possibly this is the lower and harder to see/access nut, for the plate that’s on the front of the engine cover, which holds many parts of the wiring loom.
This tubular plastic lead junction has caused me some grief. I can’t work out how to disconnect it. And until I do, it’s not possible to finish getting the wiring loom out of the way.
Her you can see I’ve put the radiator clips inside the engine bay. Just so as not lose them!
And the other one!
So that’s it for tonight. A few other things I did, but didn’t photograph, include numbering all the wired connections in pairs.
Tomorrow I’ll drain the oil out of the engine. And disconnect the negative pole of the car battery. Then there’s more disassembling before doing the gasket and cambelt.
After our car died last Thursday, the AA got us home. At a not inconsiderable cost. So… with no money for repairs, what to do? I decided to get her up somehow, for inspection. I tried using a trolley jack I have, and some ordinary jacks. But no dice.
Bought these ramps from Halfords.
It was time to buy some ramps. Halfords in March did’nae have any. But the Wisbech branch had some, for £45 a pair. But without wheels, how was I to get ‘em? Fortunately our pal Ken was kind enough to give me a lift to Wisbech, so I could collect them. Cheers, buddy!
These ramps do the job nicely.
The ramps will be very useful if I need to access the underside of the vehicle/engine bay. And I imagine I will need to. But I didn’t need to today. Thanks are also due to our neighbour, Sean, for helping me get the car up on the ramps.
Step one in getting the rocker cover off.
I decided to photograph each step. And, starting with the picture above, that’s what this series of photos depict. All I was doing today was removing the ‘rocker cover’. So I could see if the cam-belt was indeed, as the AA engineer believed, broken.
Disconnecting wiring..
The first thing I discovered on starting this job is that YouTubers routinely make things look very easy. Usually they’ll be doing stuff they’ve done many times before. But if you’re not used to whatever it is? As an example, disconnecting some of the wiring junctions proved much harder than expected. It’s amazing how discouraging that can be!
… gradually got easier.
Gradually things got easier. Which was encouraging. The hoses all came off very nicely and cleanly. This was a relief, as old tubing can be brittle and perish, etc.
Each of these was easier than the last!And this was the easiest of them all!Front end of the spark plug wiring loom.Back of the spark plug wiring loom.There were a couple of points like this.
The above photo shows a point where a male peg goes into a female hole. But it wasn’t actually connected. This one was at the back. There was another, pictured below, on the left side of the engine.
Another unattached point.
One thing that really spooked me was the long doodad in the image below, below the spark plug wiring. None of the YouTube videos I watched had any such parts, so I was stumped. Nor could I find any diagrams online that explained this mysterious appendage.
A complete overview of the spark plug wiring.
Luckily I stumbled across a video by an American dude that clarified the matter. Turns out it’s a thing called a VVT, or Variable Valve Timing mechanism. Guess I might need to look into that?
Jerry-rigged the variable timing mechanism.
One thing I didn’t photograph, and should’ve, was a 19mm nut at the rear of the engine cover, that was a real mother to loosen. I had to use a mallet to get that loosened off! Once I’d done that I was able to lift the whole thing up and secure it with a bungee cord.
Front end of variable timing thing, note gasket.
As the photo below shows, I tried to arrange my nuts n bolts in such way that they’d be easy to replace in their proper order.
I tried to keep my nuts in order.
As can be seen below, I got the spark plugs out okay, these were, once again, rather different to anything I’d seenYouTubers dealing with. Fortunately if anything my set up is easier.
This tube clips into the bracket.
And then it was the moment of truth; removing all the bolts holding the rocker cover in place, which I did in a cross-cross fashion, a la drum head tuning, to keep the release of tension/pressure even.
And lo and behold, a busted cam belt!
And so it was that, finally, I was able to get the cover off and see… And yea, verily, the cam belt was busted. The AA engineer spook sooth! I was able to gently work it out. And it’s lying there, rather tragically, in the above pic. But is the engine itself okay? I can’t tell, to be honest.
The engine, in all its glory.
So, I managed to get the engine apart, and find the source of the problem. And the AA guy was right. Busted cam belt. Now what do I do? I guess I have a crack at replacing the timing belt? But that’s an even more complex and challenging job.
It’s late, getting dark… testing the ECU with OBD.
Yesterday Teresa and I packed our picnic basket and headed out for a lovely lunch at Anglesey Abbey.
Sadly, between Fordham and Burwell, on the B1102 Ness Road, an orange engine diagnostic light came on, followed – in seconds – by the engine conking out.
We were relatively lucky inasmuch as a lay-by appeared on our left exactly as this happened. Our forward momentum was enough to get us in and parked, off the main road, and safe.
Several other people were parked in the lay-by. I asked the nearest if he wouldn’t mind helping us try and jump-start our car off his battery. Fortunately I carry jump-leads 90% of the time (due to previous experiences!). He obliged.
But sadly that didn’t work. I thought I ought to try, as I’d had an engine failure about six to eight weeks ago, where I’d just run out of petrol and the battery had also died.
But this time there was still petrol, and the battery appeared to be ok. And the jump-lead start failed. So… time to call the AA!
Got this via Amazon Vine, some time ago.Not the swankiest of its kind. But useful.
The AA engineer got to us quicker than I’d ever experienced before (20-30 minutes?). And very quickly diagnosed a failed cam-belt. I asked how he could be so sure, without seeing it; the cam-belt is enclosed, at the front of the engine, behind two other external belts (and all sorts of other gubbins) .
He said it’s the sound. There’s no tell-tale compression, apparently. If there were compression you’d have that wheezy but rhythmic ‘turning over but not catching’ sound.
My AA membership didn’t include getting us and our dead car home. So I called a company to see if they – Manchetts – could ‘recover’ us. Yes, for approx £250-ish!
What about the AA? They could do it, for about £180-ish. So I went with the AA, naturally! Chatting with the AA engineer on the way home, about our options, he seemed to feel that it was highly likely the cam-belt going had killed the engine, bending rods, or some such.
However, when I got home, and started researching this issue, it got very confusing. My mum and her husband Malcolm had, on learning what’s happened (we were supposed to go and see them on Sunday, but that’s not happening now!), also looked into it.
They came up with some more encouraging info (thanks!), suggesting that Mazda engines are built in such a way that a cam-belt failure isn’t necessarily fatal. Oh, how I hope this proves to be the case for us!
P1345 code… que pasa?
We simply don’t have the funds for a new car, or even a repair to the current motor. And I really love this car. So I’d prefer to keep her going, if at all possible.
I started watching YouTube videos on cam-belt changes. And I’ve found a good few. One, by MX5parts.co.uk is pretty good. But an even better one is by TheCarPassionChannel. (Watch it here.)
Both videos show the cam-belt being replaced by one guy, working at home, using basic tools. So there’s a bit of hope it’s a job I may be able to do myself.
TheCarPassionChannel’s video is the better of these two, because he moves the camera(s) around much more, such that you get a far better and clearer view of everything he’s doing.
Annoyingly everything’s shut – at least everything I’ve tried, car parts and service/garage wise – for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. So I can’t get quotes on repairs, or pricing for parts, etc.
Anyway, numerous plans have been scuppered. A trip to the seaside today. A Curtis Mayfield tribute gig in London tonight. A visit to mum’s at the weekend. Hey-ho!
Pressing the VIN button didn’t do anything.
So, what to do!? I’m kind of hoping I can install a new timing belt myself. As per the videos I’ve been watching. But it’s not a simple job, by any means. And how am I going to get about to my teaching?
Some time later the same day…
I just remembered Amazon Vine sent me an OBD unit some while back. Ages ago actually! And until now I haven’t used it. With what feels horribly like it might be a terminal fault, I thought the time had come to track it down and use it.
After a bit of stressed searching, I did locate it, and give it a go. It was getting late and pretty dark – about 10pm – by the time I went out to check the car. So I had to do it by torchlight.
Finding the ECU/OBD interface point was the first challenge. You have to plug the OBD in first, then turn the ignition on. I read the manual, which is in mangled Engrish, and far from excellent.
The DTC button is what you press to get the codes. I was hoping for a fully explanatory readout. But all I got was ‘P1345 Manufacturer Control’. This means you have to look the fault code up on ye internet.
And so it is, that now, 11pm, the day after the engine conked out, I’m still not really too much the wiser about what’s gone wrong or what to do. The info I got googling MX5 P1345 is rather diverse and varied!
I hope somewhere that can help me might be open on Saturday. Otherwise it’ll be Monday by the time I can talk to anybody. And it might very well start cutting into my teaching/earnings.
Yesterday I bought this handsome set from a Facebook seller locally. We were on our way to Anglesey Abbey, for a lunchtime picnic. That didn’t work out, for reasons I’ll cover in another separate post.
But en route we stopped over at an address in Chatteris, and I bought this delightful set of Mr Men books for a tenner. A tenner!!!
Each individual book is £2.50. Fifty at that price translates to £125 in total. I fully expected that the boxed set would – obviously, surely? – be somewhat cheaper. After all, you want to make the bulk buy attractive, don’t you?
The entire series.What? No bulk buy discount!?
So I was surprised to see that this set has, printed on the reverse of the hard-case, the full £125 asking price! This makes the tenner I paid even sweeter. And the condition of the set is immaculate. Brand new in all but name.
We don’t have kids. But these will not only potentially come in handy as and when kiddies are visiting us. But, truth be told, we adore them ourselves. They’re so sweetly innocent and charming. And most of them are a part of our own childhoods.
After the trauma of yesterday’s vehicular disaster (see this other post), reading a few of these today was a massively uplifting experience. The inner child lives on lustily in both Teresa and myself!
The (Mr) Man Who Wasn’t There!
I read Mr Nobody to myself. I find the theme here quite attractive. Almost Zen!? It’s not really intended that way. As Mr Nobody’s ‘nothingness’ – beautifully and so simply conveyed by his being see-through – is a bad thing, to be corrected.
I then read two to Teresa, putting on voices like a parent to a child. And it was wonderful. Not having children of our own, being, simple and childlike ourselves can be a real balm. A release from the unceasing cares of adulthood!
First I read Mr Rude, a later title (as was Mr Nobody), which I hadn’t had or read as a child, as it’s far more recent. Mr Happy forces himself on Mr Rude, as a house-guest, eventually helping Mr Rude find his better self. Lovely!
Delightful!
Teresa wanted me to read Mr Uppity. This is one I did encounter first many, many moons ago. Roger Hargreaves’ delightfully playful works occasionally use what Tolkien called ‘fairey’. And here we find Mr Uppity visiting the Goblin Kingdom, and thereby learning to be politer and nicer.
Utterly charming, and conveying simple homely morality, wonderfully illustrated in such a beguilingly naive and simple manner. Just lovely!
I told myself that, at least in part, I was getting these as illustration work type reference material. And so it is. But in truth I just love these books. And I’m very happy to own this set. Both as possible inspiration for my own work, and as little gems in their own right.
The blue building is my current/old shed. The pile of stuff on the ground is the new one!
Yesterday old school friend Trevor very kindly helped me move Ken’s old shed from his new place on Norwood Road to our home. Cheers, Trev’!
It doesn’t look too impressive (pictured above). But then you can’t actually see it, as it’s all under the roofing materials. The wooden crap on top is only there to stop stuff blowing away!
Ken, on a recent visit.
Thanks also to Ken, for the shed itself, and for very patiently storing it in his garden for a good long while! And also to Ruben, our neighbour, who helped us unload when he saw us shifting the panels.
Moving the ‘new’ shed highlighted the dodgy wiring to the current shed, which is overhead, and got in the way a bit! And access to the garden via the communal back passage-way (snigger) was always going to be hard work.
Next up I need to do the concrete base. And then it’ll be time to start restoring and re-assembling the shed itself.
Trevor, on his smallholding, just outside March.
Anyway, we’ve been very lucky. A free shed, and a free move of said shed. That’s really something. And Teresa and I are very grateful. We were also lucky with the weather. Amidst frequent rain showers, some very heavy, we enjoyed a sunny spell for the actual move. The heavens just opening as we finished. Result!
I wish I’d got some photos of the process of actually picking up and moving the shed. I should’ve had Teresa ride shotgun, with some form of camera, recording the happy event! But the activity of doing it all was quite demanding, and chased all thought of documenting it from my mind.
The garden, looking very ‘green and pleasant land’-ish.
The weather has been very changeable, and drowsily muggy, of late. When it’s not cloudy and raining, it’s warm and sunny. And the two states have been alternating rapidly. Just now we got back from a little lunch break in the sunshine, and boom, the rains cameth down.
Up on the wall, finally. The (nearly) finished new look.
I thought I’d posted about this project before, here on my blog. But I can’t find any such entry! (I may have to go back and remedy that?) Anyhoo… here’s a ‘second’ instalment on the subject.
The original project was something I did several years ago, after buying a book in Heffers, Cambridge, on African masks. I bought that book even further back, a number of years earlier, with the intention of trying to replicate some tribal type African artefacts for decorating our home.
How the ‘face’ looked at start of play, with the ‘beard’ tucked away.
As as ever with my artistic projects, I’m not at all happy with my efforts. This is something that has generally stymied me in this department all my life! Indeed, lack of self-belief has grown to such an extent that I just really don’t do any art anymore. Same with the music.
Anyway, whatever. As folk say these days! For what it’s worth (or not?), this is my attempt to do something with this mask to make it such that I do like it. I’d like to say I don’t care. But the truth, as always, is more nuanced and complex than that.
The mask, all ‘masked’ up, and marked up!
This is how it is at present. Or rather how it evolved today. Even in its first stage it went through several separate steps. As I searched for the elusive something. The basic design is a mish-mash of elements from various masks in the reference book.
Today’s stages were first: masking off the ‘beard’/back of the mask; then masking some striped patterns on the front face; painting a black gloss coat over the front; and finally the tape is removed, and… ‘wallah!’, as many folk have it in Franglais.
Looking quite weird. But I quite like the green stripes.
I think it’ll need ‘knocking back’ or ‘weathering’, as it’s poss’ a bit too stark or pristine as is. Anyroad, I definitely do like it better now. I’m still not very happy with it. But an improvement is something. And it’s my first attempt. Maybe I ought to just move on to a second? We shall see…
From the right side.And the left.
I’ll let the latest layer dry overnight. And tomorrow I’ll work on weathering it a bit. Sanding, scraping, maybe some brown (strong tea?) washes? Then I need to work up some kind ageing or patina. Hmmm!?
It’s horrid, being a total wuckfit. I just made a trip, locally, only to get home and panic about losing my iPhone. Teresa called it, I searched the car. No dice. So I drove back to where I’d been earlier. Still no luck. The guy there called my number.
My iPhone wasn’t at his, where I thought it might have been. Lucky for me he called my phone again, as I frantically searched my car for a third time, on his driveway. And so it was I found the confounded thing. Thanks to the vibrate feature rattling the plastic of the dashboard.
Or do I feel more Cletus?
Turned out it was in one of the two or three places I normally put it, in my car, all along. Only it had slid deeper and out of sight. This elusiveness was compounded by the fact that it isn’t ringing audibly, regardless of which position I set it to, on the silent/loud toggle switch.
So the £10 I’d bartered off the item I bought has, literally, gone up in smoke. And time and anxiety have been expended entirely pointlessly. ‘They let you out on your own!?’ quipped my Fenny Facebook seller, quite justifiably.
NB – This is another archival entry. I think I read and reviewed this originally around Jan/Feb, 2021.
‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’ Vonnegut in his intro to this book.
I stumbled upon, or was reminded of, a few terrific Vonnegut quotes fairly recently, reminding me that I’d loved reading some of his stuff, years ago.
So I ordered a couple of his works I hadn’t already encountered, namely Slap Stick, and this, Mother Night. (I have to remark on how great the cover designs of these Vintage editions are, really very striking!) His trademark wit is present and correct as ever. But I’d forgotten how very bleak quite a lot of his prose fiction can be.
I don’t really want to synopsise the content here (the wiki entry on the book is great for that). In a nutshell it’s about apathy and belief, or how engaged one really is with what goes on around one. If we take Vonnegut’s own quote from the intro (reproduced above) at face value, it’s rather Hamlet-like in it’s utter weariness at our shabby play-acting.
These dark and comfortless ideas are embedded in a very clever but horribly bleak context, in which the narrator protagonist, Howard Campbell Jr, is both a former Nazi propagandist and a double-agent for US secret services, recounting his bizarre life story from an Israeli jail cell.
It’s a short easy read; I read the whole thing in one day. But it’s a bit hard going psychologically, on account of it being so relentlessly dark. Vonnegut, like so many, saw things in WWII that, unsurprisingly, coloured his entire life thereafter. But the pitch black darkness of the vision of humanity offered here is, unlike the more uplifting quotes I recently encountered by him elsewhere, energy-sapping.
As always, Vonnegut’s very clever, highly articulate, effortlessly imaginative and even darkly funny. But this is so grindingly dark, it’s certainly not a favourite from Vonnegut’s canon, a least for me. Unlike some of his writings, from Sirens of Titan to Breakfast of Champs, I can’t see myself ever re-reading this one.
UPDATE: Rather ironically, given my stated desire not to re-read this, whilst posting this old review I discovered that Mother Night is the subject of a local reading group event, coming up soon. So, I may well re-visit it, after all!
‘Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.’ [1]
Imagine, if you will, talking with some friends. And later coming away from an apparently convivial gathering. Only to reflect on it, later on, and realise something really quite horribly shocking.
Those people, all smiles and cups of tea, believe that you are not just destined for an eternity in Hell, but that you are in cahoots with Beelzebub! It sounds – at least to what I would call ‘reasonable people’, such as I flatter myself to be – utterly preposterous. And so it is, in my view.
But, if ‘the faithful’ take their religion(s) at all seriously, one has to suppose it’s the kind of thing vast swathes of humanity apparently actually do believe. I only come up against it all occasionally, and when I do, it’s certainly not in the form of Father Jack types drooling and screaming ‘Ye’ll all bourn in Hell!’ [2]
But it bothers me deeply; it’s my roots, where I come from. And it gets me especially where it concerns family and long-standing friends. With terrible irony these folk will reassure me to my face that ‘no, no, we don’t judge you like that’. But, when all is said and done, I simply don’t believe them. What on earth (or in Heaven or Hell’s name) is the point of any of the whole crazy rigmarole if you don’t take it remotely seriously?
I suppose on one level – and that complicates things; religions are so many things – religions are just very bizarre social clubs. And as long as you don’t rock the boat too much, or too often, many doubtless just muddle along, frequently beset by gnawing doubts that it is all a complete crock.
But the trade-off of belonging is, it seems, so seductively powerful it all too often obliterates a person’s better judgement. Doubts are cast as tests of one’s faith, as sinful folly; the whisperings of devils like me! But if mere lip service can suffice, I guess that accounts for a lot?
It’s much the same with law-abiding in our society. Most people will break the law many times in their life, sometimes multiple times in one day (driving?). Mainly in minor ways. And mostly without consequence. And as long as they don’t bump up against the harder edges of The Law’s societal ramifications too often, these unexamined and nebulously elastic relationships just about work.
And I suppose that for vast swathes of humanity their relations to their beliefs are a similar fudge. But when one allies oneself with a religion in contemporary Britain, where science and education have, ostensibly, quite deep roots, surely it bears a little thinking about?
Of course it usually happens that folk believe in the inherited echo-chamber of Chinese-whispers they inherit from those around them. So, to the discomfiture of many Brexiteering Little Englanders, if you’re born in certain pockets of London or the Midlands, your world may be Muslim. [3]
The world I come from is littered with the wreckage of nearly two millennia of Christian traditions. A polymorphous stream of constantly evolving tales, and resultant cultural artefacts, that so obviously makes a total nonsense out of any ideas that religion is handed down from an unchanging divine authority On High. This muddled hotch-potch ossifies into ‘tradition’.
The desire for stability such fantasies so clearly signal is very understandable. But the evidence of history is so overwhelmingly against such notions, in just the same way that archaeology and palaeontology and suchlike confirm not sacred texts, but secular scientific explanations.
How and why folk cling on to religions bewilders me. I can see their utility, giving social cohesion, a sense of community, and whatnot. But why do we need to have a core of absolute twaddle around which to gather and function? Why can we not gather in similar ways around reality and the truth? [4]
Such trains of thought are especially vexing precisely because the pious apparently believe they are concerned with truth. It really and truly galls me that there’s no humanist equivalent to the better parts of religion. But it does seem a prerequisite of successful group cohesion that the group must cohere around some utterly nutty and ridiculous nonsense. Is this a quirk of our psychological evolution?
Potentially very interesting, but actually pretty disappointing
But returning to the themes that got this post started; in much the same way that one can feel the icy hand of paranoia on one’s shoulder, if one reflects on what devoutly religious folk one knows might actually be thinking, what is the value of cultivating such relationships?
Most religions attempt to encourage their acolytes to socialise amongst their own. And it’s obvious why. Exposure to other ideas and beliefs will challenge and very likely change what it is ‘the faithful’ believe.
And for the secular humanist type, like me, it can seem sensible not to waste one’s time exchanging niceties with people who harbour pre-medieval delusions about a spirit world in which I am, at best, one of the damned, and at worst, a gleeful accomplice of the Devil and his imps.
Some from both camps – secular and faithful – might say ‘lighten up’. And that is indeed good advice. If all religion were treated merely as poetic, that might be a viable stance. But for us non-believers to really be able to contemplate lightening up, requires ardent zealots of the various faiths to ‘hold more lightly’ their cherished delusions. And I don’t see that happening any time soon.
And, to now get really heavy. If push came to shove, and shove came to biff, and so on – as it all too often does – where would I stand? Well, I’d like to stand with reason and humanity. Against unreason and inhumanity.
UPDATE:
I feel I ought to add a little explanatory disclaimer, if that’s the right term?
Although I feel this ought to go without saying (hence not saying it originally!), I don’t necessarily love or like the people who hold views I share more, simply because we share certain outlooks. And equally, I don’t necessarily dislike or disavow folk I disagree with simply because of their views. That process, of evolving relationships, depends on so many factors.
I only add this note because my dad read this, and is a Christian. And he sent me a message that, well… least said soonest mended. And anyway, that’s private family stuff. But he ought to know I love him to bits.
I don’t think it’s that odd, or even very unusual, to love other people but lament some of their views – I mean, this is precisely what the faithful will so often profess – or even how they may sometimes behave. Anyway, Pops, we love ya!
Not that anyone reads this other than me and occasionally a friend or relative. But some folk might counter some of the the above disclaimer thus:
1) I’m claiming for myself exactly what I say the faithful are hypocritical in claiming, namely tolerance of different views. Well, I think my whole case rests contrasting a subjective human position founded on evidence against an alleged repose in Divine authority. So I’m not even going to grace such critiques with a response.
2) Religions, and I’ll limit myself to Christianity for now, complex and multifaceted as they are (what else would a human created system be? The more you dispassionately examine them, the more religions reflect their human origins, as opposed to their supposedly Divine ones), often have parts that – as well as paradoxically condemning their ‘out groups’ – profess to care most for them. Once again, such arguments are freighted so completely with such low-level unexamined assumptions as to be unworthy of reply. Not only is it totally paradoxical, it’s also patronising at a level that only the delusion of Divine sanctions for one’s own beliefs can attain.
NOTES:
[1] Allegedly a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night! Which I recently reviewed here.
[2] Father Jack is a character in the terrific Father Ted TV series.
[3] I’ve experienced this myself. Both reading about it (as in the Price of Paradise, that I’ve just read and reviewed), and in ordinary daily life. Staying in an AirB&B in a certain London borough, some years ago, was the closest I’ve got to being in a ghetto, or visiting India/Asia.
[4] This area of thought brings to mind Alain de Botton’s Religion For Atheists, and suchlike.
An excellent book, that is by turns fascinating and horribly depressing.
Starting with the assassination of a Russian Tsar, and moving forwards in time, via such phenomenon as the Kamikaze pilots of Japan in WWII, Iain Overton traces a history of suicide bombing.
One thing that may initially surprise readers – it certainly surprised me (though on reflection, less so) – is how recent a development the suicide bomber is. One could potentially quibble as to a slightly deeper origin (did any of the killers-self destruct during the ‘infernal device’ attempt on Napoleon’s life? Or were the casualties of that either unwitting proxies and/or unfortunate bystanders?).
Although it’s grim reading, Overton’s skill in laying out this macabre evolution is impressive. Indeed, at times his deft authorial touch was almost a bit too slick. And at those times it felt, to me, like there was a danger that the subject was becoming a form of extreme adventure tourism reportage.
One has to wonder, in an age and about a subject matter in which such reportage can attract the very worst kind of medieval responses from the enraged faithful, what makes anyone stick their head above the parapet at all. As Alan Partidge jokes when Sidekick Simon irreverently conflates Judaism with Islam, you can poke fun at Christians, by all means, and maybe Jews ‘a little bit’. But Islam is off limits! And for reasons made all too obvious in this book.
Of course Overton isn’t making fun of Islam. Nor, as he is at pains to point out, are suicide bombers only ever Arab Muslims. But even the mere attempt by an ‘outsider’ to discuss some of the subjects covered here might seem to many a red rag to a deranged homicidal bull. And yet he proceeds, over the course of 16 or so well constructed chapters to attempt to forensically study the rise of the suicide bomber.
That this mostly revolves around Islamic practitioners of this grisly but incredibly potent weapon will surprise no one. But the route there may. Taking in not just the aforementioned Russian anarchists and Japanese pilots, but also Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. And Overton does a great job of mapping the grim and bloody road.
For most of the book the author successfully occludes his own judgements, in that time honoured modern western liberal mode of at least attempting to be balanced and dispassionate. Only occasionally letting slip through, or sometimes outrightly acknowledging, his own biases.
In examining why folk – be they men, women, or even children – might allow themselves to kill and be killed this way, or even embrace (sometimes individually, but more often in a collective context), such a ‘martyrdom’, and what the fallout is for the victims, their loved ones and the physically and mentally traumatised survivors, Overton eventually climbs down off the fence.
And so it is that quite near the end of this sizeable book, most clearly when talking about the victims, he talks bluntly of the ‘ugly ideology’ and ‘religious delusions’ of the perpetrators, and how wrong it is that those they murder be remembered solely via such an abrupt and violent end to their lives. Lives which had, until that cataclysmically fateful intersection, nothing to do with such toxic pre-medieval nonsense, enabled as it so frequently is, ironically, by so diabolically modern means.
It’s hard not to look at the events covered here, and how things have continued to develop since the book was published (2018) and despair. The self-appointed Davids of these persistent backwards folklores may not have slain the ‘Great Satan’ Goliaths, but they still seem to be winning, inasmuch as their impact is so incredibly pervasive. And that so few can adversely affect so many.
And with tragic irony all who aspire to a better world ultimately seem to lose. Only the thugs cloaked as religious fanatics, or the corporate suits – be they in Western or Arab garb – both disguising themselves, however thinly, cynically or otherwise, as ‘respectable’ types, literally profit.
Everyone else – and that’s beyond those killed and injured – suffers doubly. Firstly with the ever growing all-pervasive fears of death and destruction, and second with the zero-sum scenario, in which vast overspending on paranoic ‘defense’ measures, and the none too subtle erosion of hard won human rights, find the already far from perfect conditions of life in so-called liberal western societies (and elsewhere) being fundamentally eroded and undermined.
On the one hand I’m quite keen to read Overton’s previous book, Gun, Baby, Gun. But on the other I’m chary of doing so. Like the violence of the world generally, there’s a macabre fascination with the ‘dark side’. But one also needs to be wary of over-saturation, or even contamination, with all this ‘dark matter’.
Still, all in all, a very good and much needed book. He even offers, as one might hope and expect, some ideas about how we might move towards a better place. Hardly a light or easy read, but definitely recommended.
