Cancelling the Lord’s Prayer So, the Lord’s Prayer is too much for a major cinema chain’s advertising agency: Digital Cinema Media? Apparently it is because it’s from a Christian organisation, so it might upset other religions. Why? The majority of religions believe, as the dictionary says: ‘in a superhuman controlling power, especially a God’.

Narrowing this down, when I was an obnoxious teenager, I demanded a definition of what God is and the desperate teacher gave me a simple, acceptable definition: ‘God is love.’ So what is the fuss all about?

Don’t most religions have some place in their beliefs for the overriding power of love? Anyway, isn’t our world at the moment driven by the much more sinister superhuman controlling power of greed? Isn’t greed the chief underlying driving force of all those other advertisements the agency insists on inflicting on us before we see the film we have paid to see?

If it’s between greed and love, give me love anytime. Besides, correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought we were a Christian country, the Queen being nominal head of the Church of England: a Christian Church.

What is wrong with reflecting this in an advert? Besides, because Christianity believes in loving everyone, no matter what their religion, many people of different faiths choose to live here, so why should they be upset?

Innocence destroyed

Remember those lovely children’s Ladybird books? They explained the world to youngsters in simple, understandable language, talking about subjects that related to them. Now some bright sparks, Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, have come up with the idea of creating spoof ‘Ladybird’ books on more adult themes, like ‘Dating’, ‘the Hangover’, ‘the Mid-Life Crisis’ and ‘The Hipster’. Whatever next? Are our children to be denied all opportunities to retain their innocence for just a little while at least?

Will they never learn?

Our big chiefs in the health department tell us they are the experts; they know what we need and know how to manage such an unwieldy, needy organisation. Oh yes? So how come the bright idea to farm out older people’s care to a consortium has fallen flat on its face? How come, after much costly negotiation and planning over 15 months, the contract for older people’s care was finally awarded to UnitingCare only to have to stop it after eight months because it’d run out of money?

Haven’t they heard of budgeting or budgeting for the future? Now that Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Group are in charge, let’s hope they manage to budget and if and when they decide to make cuts, perhaps they could start by reducing the number of their committees and the unnecessary meetings they are paid to attend, cutting out golden handshakes and prioritising from the bottom up – patients first, consultants last? We live in hope.

So, you don’t believe in water divining.

It’s hard to believe that someone walking along a field clutching a forked piece of wood can tell where there is water underneath the ground. I know, I found it very difficult to believe it when I watched my father do it successfully when we were on holiday once. Even a small town in Bavaria is reported to have sought the help of a water diviner to solve their problems with one particular stretch of road which was always having accidents. Would you believe it, since hiring him and following his advice to hang up wooden boxes and put up poles that negated the radiation pull of the ground, there have been no accidents since and it wasn’t last year either, it was in 2008.

India may have the answer

We may well decry India for receiving such huge donations from our country in spite of our own dire needs and we may lift our hands up in horror when we discover that this very poor country has somehow found funds to build a nuclear bomb, but India may have some ideas that could help those stranded by the recent floods. These ideas are common sense and are cost free: Twitter threads are created for people to provide regularly updated information about where people have rooms for temporary accommodation, where supplies can be obtained to take to those in need and where people can be found if relatives outside the country fear for their safety. I wonder, how many of these ideas are being applied where people are experiencing flooding now? I wonder, is this done automatically when we have floods here?