Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Without belief, can we go on cursing our enemies – or blessing our friends?

Without belief, can we go on cursing our enemies – or blessing our friends?

Has the power to curse lost its meaning for modern man? Might we, in losing it, lose something precious: the power to bless?

I was made to think about this last week, in Bristol, recording for later broadcast a couple of programmes in a series I present for BBC Radio Four. Off the Page is a modest little affair in which three writers discuss with each other and with me the short columns I have commissioned from them on a single, simple subject. Each week we take a different topic and I invite different writers (some famous, some new or unknown) to join me in talking and writing about it. The result is discursive, very informal, sometimes rambling, often sharp, never thoughtless or dim. At its best it is like half an hour with The Spectator.

I learn so much from my guests: what they think makes me think. Indeed, so absorbing are their thoughts that it sometimes slips my notice that I am presenting a radio programme and I find myself staring into the middle distance, rapt in thought as my worried guests wonder what they’re supposed to do next.

This happened on Thursday afternoon as, with George Dobell (a freelance journalist and broadcaster), Lilian Pizzichini (a biographer) and Tony Cassidy (a soul-band singer and short-story writer), I discussed our chosen subject: Superstition.

Like many lapsed Roman Catholics, Tony Cassidy had a wry and spirited view of his old faith, tinged both with bitterness and mockery. He was inclined to see the whole Roman edifice as an elaborately constructed web of superstition. George Dobell had no axe to grind against any particular Church, but took a witheringly rationalistic view of all otherworldly and spirit-worldly beliefs. He was a young Gradgrind but a funny one.

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