You Can't Argue with Religious Zeal

On Saturday, I ate tapas at the site of the former headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition. It was in Palma's main square, Placa Major, and the tapas were pretty unpleasant, but not, one assumes, as unpleasant as some of the experiences that preceded them in centuries past. When I got back to London, after two weeks in a sun-drenched bubble with no news, internet, telly or Miliballs, not much seemed to have changed. More than 500 years after the Pope suggested to another happy ruling couple that they set up a kind of Star Chamber to do with cuts (fingers, toe-nails, bowels etc), an awful lot of people seemed to be awfully busy protecting God's honour.

First, a nutcase in Godknowswhereville had said he was going to take a book he'd never read and set it alight, and then maybe not tidy his bedroom, and then maybe not eat his tea (though that would be surprising for an American) because he wanted to teach some pesky foreigners a thing or two, although what exactly he wanted to teach them wasn't quite clear, and the President of the world's only remaining superpower actually made a statement about it, and so did the Secretary of State, and so did every Tom, Dick and Ali in every newspaper all over the world, and then a lot of people who didn't seem to be terribly good at group efforts when it came to helping their brothers and sisters in Pakistan took to the streets and started doing what they are very, very good at: threatening violence.

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