A week or so back, my two-year-old daughter said to me, apropos of nothing: ‘You have been sad since you lost Jesus.’ I didn’t really know what to do, so I looked at her open-mouthed for a bit and then fixed myself a stiff drink. Best not to get involved, I reckon. Later — again, out of the blue — she told me with great happiness that she was ‘covered with the blood of Jesus’, at which point I wondered if I should have a quiet word with her Sunday school teacher, or maybe her Gran, who is a fairly muscular born-again evangelical monkey and from whom this whacko stuff may have emanated. Sad since I lost Jesus? I’ve been sad since Douglas Alexander was made a Cabinet minister and even sadder since the pubs closed. As for Jesus, I wasn’t aware I had lost Him, or even had been properly in possession of Him in the first place.
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