Great Western Coffee Shop

From the Financial Times (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5babc08c-59fd-11e4-be86-00144feab7de.html):


I won't quote the full article, due to copyright restrictions imposed by the Financial Times, but it is worth reading, as a comparison with our UK commuter train travel experiences.

Not sure what you're referring to here? Unless the race/religion split between Slough/Reading for example? But as many get iff at both, so not quite sure?

It was the discussion of the physical risk of any passenger travelling on those particular trains that I found interesting - irrespective of their racial or political background.

A commuter in the Thames Valley may only get his/her personal space invaded...

When asked on a training course what I considered to be the size of my personal space, I asked for a tape measure, and a couple of minutes alone...

I have been to Jerusalem twice. I side with no one group, but can confirm that disputes between any two of the many groups to be found there simmer close to boil at all times. This is not confined to the traditional Jewish - Arab divide - a ladder in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has stood in the same place for well over a century because the six different Christian groups there cannot agree which one of them should remove it. The argument now is more about who started the argument than what the argument was about. It serves as a metaphor for other disputes, which could be resolved before it collapses into dust, but no-one is sure of that.

Many of the attitudes, rules and regulations, both secular and religious, over there sound bizarre to the outsider, and unlikely causes of major friction. They are far from trivial in the country.

On a lighter note, I went to see the site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, at Qumran. For those who do not know, the site was believed by some scholars to have been a scriptorium, inhabited by Essenes, who copied scrolls of scriptures from 200 BC or thenabouts. When they were about to be over-run by the Romans, they hid their scrolls in jars, placed in caves, to wait until the heat died down. It didn't, the settlement was destroyed, and the scrolls remained hidden until a bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammed Edh-Dhib found them whilst looking for lost sheep in 1946. He threw a stone into a cave from a crack above, and heard a shattering pot rather than an annoyed "Baa!" The first recovered portion contained part of the book of Isaiah, written in Hebrew largely understandable by Hebrew speakers today.

A wooden tower with a long and winding ramp overlooks the excavated ruins of the scriptorium. I was following Moshe, our guide, up this ramp. He was singing "The long and winding road", and I joined in with "Leads me back" etc. "Do you know the significance of this song?" he asked me. I stirred my brain into action. Did Isaiah arrive by a long and winding road? Don't think so. John the Baptist? No, he cried aloud in the wilderness. The Romans didn't build long and winding roads. After some minutes of going over my wholly inadequate knowledge of the Old Testament, the history of Israel, and the Roman occupation thereof, I gave in.

"It was the last single released by the Beatles whilst all four were alive", said my guru, born in South Africa.