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Friday 4 July 2008

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

From a position, I must admit, of ignorance, I have always been suspicious of psychotherapy. It seems to encourage unhappy people to do what they do too much of anyway, which is to concentrate on themselves. Wouldn’t it be much more liberating to lie on a couch and be forced to talk to a therapist about someone else? For this therapy to work, one would not be allowed to discuss people who mattered to one personally — parents, children, spouse, etc. Instead, one would be forced to imagine the plight of those one knew little, or not at all — a person who worked in a call centre, perhaps, or Professor John Carey, or Gordon Brown. One’s own problems would quickly come into a proper perspective.

When I first visited Zimbabwe in the early Nineties, I came across the powerful story of an Englishman, John Bradburne. He was, in his own words, a ‘strange vagabond of God’, who ended up living with the inmates of a remote leper colony called Mutemwa, which means ‘You are cut off’. He inhabited a tin shack near the lepers’ huts and would help care for the lepers, pray with them and create musical settings of the Mass which they would play in the bush church, banging on the drums with their stumps. John Bradburne was an early martyr of Robert Mugabe. Despite his absolute lack of interest in politics, he aroused the suspicions of Mugabe’s guerrillas because he refused to leave the lepers despite the dangers of the civil war. In September 1979, Mugabe’s guerrillas kidnapped him, subjected him to a rather Christ-like trial in the bush, and shot him. Since then, a cult of John Bradburne has grown up, and some want him made a saint, attributing miracles to him. Bradburne wrote poems, reciting them in his own very beautiful voice. One of the best things he did was to dignify each leper, and he tried to write a separate poem about every one, by name (‘This is the panoply of Dick — / Blanket, love, and a blind man’s stick’). Friends of John Bradburne have now made a selection and released them on a CD called Alive to God (Herald Talking Books, www.heraldav.co.uk). It is more poignant than ever to hear them today now that Bradburne’s killers have reduced the entire country to the poverty which, in his day, was reserved for the people he tended.

‘A billion people will lose their homes because of climate change,’ I half-heard, listening to Radio 4 at breakfast. Someone will one day write a fascinating history of how the climate change idea was implanted in the public mind. How has it come about that almost literally any claim can be made on behalf of this phenomenon, and we must all report it credulously, look concerned, and pay more taxes to propitiate it?

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