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Tuesday 2 December 2008

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Gordon Brown’s moral compass is more like a dodgy satnav

Of course, the churches don’t much want to be lumped in with the cult of the spoon, or the mysteries of three-headed goatmen from Pluto. They don’t want to be mere youth clubs or social groups, either. So, they piously harp on about their blasted moral compass — in the title, no less — and then get annoyed when everybody thinks this is the point. And perhaps, if they actually studied the thing, or their radar, or their astrolabe, or whatever the hell else they carry around in place of actual, normal, common sense, they would realise that this was exactly the wrong thing to do. Meeep.

What makes 27 dolphins ground themselves on a beach in Cornwall? A dolphin Heaven’s Gate? Did they, too, have a defective compass, moral or otherwise? It is the sort of mystery that reminds you of the limitations of being human, with more than a whiff of Douglas Adams. Why does anything come out of the sea? Why did we?

During the year I lived in South Africa, there was a similar recurring problem with crayfish. The little lobsters kept wandering up on to the beach, in their thousands, and dying. People would rush down to collect them up in buckets and chuck them back in the sea, and get into fights with other, hungrier, often somewhat darker people, who had also brought buckets and fancied a spot of crayfish. Eventually, the authorities would post armed police, and the conservationists would technically win. But by then, of course, half the remaining crayfish would be dead, but the hungry folk from the townships would still be barred from picking them up. That’s South Africa for you. Bonkers.

The local papers would report the phenomenon as a ‘crayfish walkout’. A lovely phrase. These crayfish, they have had enough. No more scuttling around in the corals. They are downing tools, moving on. One thought of teams of furious crayfish, around a brazier. As opposed to how they normally ended up, which, alas, was in one.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.

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