Another long gap in posting. I'm not sure if this is down to busy-ness or disinclination. If the latter, am I just being idle or have I tapped into the mood of the moment. Is the mood one of enervation or is it just personal low-wattage?

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What a difference a couple of months makes. For the last week the Army's problems in Helmand have been all over the news, triggered by the higher than normal number of casualties and deaths out there. Yet back in May the media and the public seemed to have forgotten about Afghanistan; generally speaking, we were too busy finding out about the ways in which MPs had been playing the Commons' allowances system.

Operation Panther's Claw has been partly responsible for the rise in the number of deaths and some of the population will have maintained their concern for what was happening in Afghanistan in spite of May's juicy political scandal but the fact remains that we're not good at multi-tasking with political stories and, once our attention has been diverted, we don't retain what we've just learned. Political stories have a way of simply dying themselves, as if we depend upon the collective focus to maintain interest or we become slightly shamefaced about forgetting the old stories.

This attention deficit gives politics a curious serial quality as if it was a sequence of court cases. The government are in the dock over something they did or didn't do but in the great majority of cases the jury never reaches a verdict; something else comes up and the government are let off the hook. Sometimes the focus shifts away from the government to greedy bankers or incompetent social workers but it's surprising how often government mistakes trump others' misdeeds. The media were very quick to focus on Lord Myners letting Sir Fred Goodwin get away with his fat pension (AIG directors' remuneration got the Obama administration into hot water in its first weeks in office).

Right now the Prime Minister is the focus of media attention (ie. on trial) for opting to send just 700 more troops to Afghanistan instead of the 2,000 extra the defence chiefs appeared to have wanted. Listening to the PM answer questions from James Arbuthnot on this when he went before the Commons Liaison Committee on Wednesday was deeply unimpressive. It was obvious he was stalling but, more than that, the game of 'I'll answer the question I would have liked you to ask me' had rendered the exercise pointless. It's clear that there's no way to frame the question in such a way as to force a clever minister to spill the beans'.

The Prime Minister came out of the exchange looking decidedly shifty and we can only assume that some combination of parsimony and covering up for past mistakes led to the 700 soldiers decision. The committee appearance served no purpose as the public have drawn their own conclusions and the Prime Minister already had form for appearing shifty.

Two things can be said in the PM's defence. Firstly, and more personally, he talks as if he understands that he's supposed to be accountable. He seems to speak to journalists more and, given the long record that New Labour have now, that's never going to be easy.

The second point relates to the political system rather than this particular Prime Minister's personal style. The fact is with the kind of politics we have the part of national life the Prime Minister is responsible for is all about money. Politicians make the decision they do because they are under financial constraints. (Critics may say that a lot of money is wasted in the public sector but public funds have been seeping away to public servants and government contractors since the time of the pharoahs.) The critical issue is that the election debate there should be about how much money there is and what the government should spend it on is never going to happen. The spending review and the defence review will happen after the general election. The opposition won't challenge the government on this sufficiently forcefully because it suits them not to have spell these thing out to potential voters. They probably couldn't make a serious fuss anyway, because the public aren't sufficiently interested.

This issue of being clear about the sums is the area where revolt is really needed, not the MP's expenses. It's the endless reporting on policies without the sums that makes UK politics so short-term and, ultimately, futile.

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I've been on one good walk in the last fortnight. This was along the western side of Blackdown on Monday last week. I avoided getting soaked by seconds. I knew that it was going to become busier work-wise after that. However, on Thursday we had made a day trip to the Isle of Wight, just visiting old haunts. We were pleased to see the new walkway across the mud at Newtown harbour.

I've read one good book, 'The Last Breath' by Denise Mina, set in Glasgow in the nineties, I think. It was published two years ago but written before MS Windows and mobile phones became universal or the Northern Ireland peace process succeeded. Anyway, it's a good read, more for the human interest than the plot.

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I've also been reading some of the debates about the controversy around Quirinius, Governor of Syria at the beginning of the first century CE (as it seems to be called now). The controversy is that St Luke uses Quirinius's census to date the birth of Christ but the the reign of Herod the Great, the other historical fact that the evangelists use, ended in 4 BCE. Sceptics use this conflict to argue against the infallibility of Scripture while christians have been thinking of arguments to account for the discrepancy for nearly three hundred years.

Of course this raises all sorts of questions about whether Christ's divinity 'depends' upon Scripture or whether Scripture's status as inspired 'depends' upon its recognition of who Christ was.