Wines to toast a warrior saint

Towards the chimes at midnight, a few of us left a — respectable — establishment near Leicester Square. Eight or nine youngsters were brawling vigorously, boots and fists. 999 was dialled, and the response was admirably fast. The cops would no doubt have recorded it as just another trivial incident in the life of a British inner city. But how squalid.

That day, there was a story about undergraduettes moonlighting as lap-dancers or strippers, or worse. We have suffered a loss of civilisation since Newman: most of the ‘universities’ to which those girls were accredited should never have received that status. Until the day before yesterday, they would have been called the Haltemprice Mechanics’ Institute or somesuch, and done useful work. Today, the most that can be hoped for is that they do not offer degrees in pimping or whoring yet.

We had discussed Islam, expressing little sympathy. Suddenly, that changed. The attitudes of the repressive Muslim father seemed less reprehensible: his desire to protect girlhood more comprehensible. Is there a middle way between forced marriages on the one hand and Leicester Square after closing time on the other? Or is it time for cynicism and a paraphrase of Isaiah Berlin: the great bads cannot always live together?

Apropos of Islam, this is not the easiest period to discuss its early history, as it separated itself from Jewish and Christian influences. But in Jordan, there are Ummayad and Abbasid hunting lodges with frescoes. Chaps who have had a good day’s sport are being waited on by diaphanously clad girls; Haltemprice Mechanics’ Institute would have nothing to teach them. These houris are carrying trays of goblets. It seems unlikely they contained Diet Coke. In that early period, there might still have been an Arabic phrase, in regular use, for nunc est bibendum. What a tragedy that it was lost.