Sunday Morning Miscellaneous

Somewhere in the small hours, half asleep, I heard the author of this book being interviewed on the radio. He sounded more interesting and serious than this blurb would suggest, and I think he definitely has a point. For example, it has always struck me as very odd that the Nicene Creed features Jesus only as a product of virgin birth and subject of Roman persecution and Resurrection - not a word about his life, work and teachings, which for most us are rather the point.
Anyway, later on the radio I heard Peter Tatchell recalling meeting Robert Mugabe face to face (not on the occasion on which he tried to 'arrest' the Saviour of Zimbabwe). He was, Tatchell found, quite short, anything but imposing, timid and 'slightly effeminate' in manner. Rather like Hitler in that then.
On the domestic political front, it just gets better and better for Brown, who continues to break all records, though not perhaps the ones he'd prefer. Maybe he'll have to go after all, if any of that craven bunch dares to challenge him.
Enough of these ephemera. Today is always a red letter day for some of us, since it was on this date in 1906 (he liked to claim it was Good Friday, but it wasn't) that the great Samuel Beckett was born - a calamity from which he never entirely recovered. But then, which of us does? For those of us who read and loved him in our formative years, there is something about Beckett's work that seeps in deeper almost than anything else. He changes everything.