In Praise of High Christology

In Praise of High Christology

When I was received into the Catholic Church at Easter 2023, I brought with me the cautious temperament of a rationalist and the interpretive habits of a dialectical-materialist historian. The supernatural affirmations of Christianity - virgin births, resurrections, ascensions - seemed to me historical-cultural accretions rather than theological essentials. I admired the Church’s ethical tradition, its ritual dignity, and its philosophical heritage. But my interest was in recovering what I took to be the authentic teaching of Jesus: a Galilean prophet preaching justice, humility, and love in anticipation of the coming Kingdom of God.

My guides in this project were John Dominic Crossan and Geza Vermes. The goal was to peel away layers of myth and redaction to uncover the historical Jesus beneath: not the Christ of creeds and cathedrals, but the man of parables, aphorisms, and subversive proximity to the poor.

Yet the historical Jesus, plausibly reconstructed by scholarship, is a curiously parochial figure: situated firmly in the Judaic prophetic tradition, saturated with eschatological expectation. His charisma and intelligence are evident; but his unmediated teachings, stripped of liturgical and metaphysical scaffolding, began to seem a slender basis for the Universal Church.

The early Church, faced with the delay of the Parousia and the challenge of mission to the Gentiles, clearly thought so too. Jesus's message was partially preserved but also transfigured, infused with the philosophical vocabulary of Greece, the rhetorical power of Rome and the viewpoint of the ages. What emerged was not a betrayal but a synthesis: a theological architecture capable of expressing truths the original proclamation only gestured toward.

I began to see that the project of the early Fathers, far from being a Hellenistic detour or corruption, was really an intellectual extension and deepening. These men did not replace Jesus with pagan myth; they reframed his life and message as the personalised embodiment of eternal metaphysical realities. The formulae of High Christology are far from arbitrary dogmas; they are compressions of experience and insight, dense with generations of meaning.

The historical-critical method remains essential. It situates the Gospels in time, alerts us to redaction, and prevents pious fantasy. But it cannot account for the existential power of the Christ-event as received, interpreted, and lived across two millennia. The miracle stories, the sacramental imagination, the metaphysical claims, they are not decorative embellishments but conceptual tools more profound than their Jewish or Greek antecedent sources.

In an age of arid secular scientism, where the sound development of consciousness and the values of community drift unanchored, unexamined and rather dispensable, the yearning for meaning persists. The metaphors of High Christology, grounded in incarnation, sacrifice, and divine indwelling, offer more than the preaching of a first-century prophet. They offer a symbolic architecture in which humanity, suffering, and transcendence are reestablished for every new generation.

Where Was The Sparkle? - short story by Adam Carlton

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She looks into the mirror. She sees a dumpy girl, mid-20s short hair, round face, not completely unattractive but far from glamorous. She has not had her fair share of boyfriends. 

Somehow the handsome young men who run things in the organisation, their gazes pass over her and fix instead on those long-haired, willowy girls with their fluent conversations and their short skirts and their smiles. She is plain speaking and doesn't know how to do any of that. 

It's remarkable that he paid any attention to her at all. He is after all a rising star. He's in his mid-20s too: slim, not exactly handsome but good looking, long hair, confident, intelligent, very well versed in the ideology of the organisation. He's a competent organiser, obviously going places, and now his attention has fixed upon her. 

He's engaged during their recent conversations, fixing her with his eyes and with his undivided attention. This is not a normal experience for her. 

And tonight they're going out and he's going to suggest that she go away on holiday with him. 

How should she prepare? She doesn't want to make compromises which aren't authentic. She's not going to dress up; she's not going to glam up or make up or do any of the other things that would be out of character.

She knows who she is.

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After their evening out, she finds herself in his flat. It's a large room: a bedsit in suburbia. They each have a coffee which is instant and comes out of a large tin on a small table near the bay window. They talk a little and then they take off their clothes and she climbs into his bed.

And now where is the magic she had viewed with trepidation, longed for? - What is she feeling? 

She's confused; he's slightly uneasy. This was not the plan: they're not easy with each other; they're not familiar. It seems like she's a stranger in this bed, this here-and-now; her inner self unmoved as they move together through the rhythmic throes of intimacy.

He makes a remark: that her skin feels greasy. Well, yes, she does have greasy skin. And no, she did not make a special attempt to shower this evening. She had a shower this morning. Okay she's greasy. That's how she comes.

He seems disappointed. They fall asleep. Next day they part: there will be no holiday. They probably will never speak again. Her life will continue and she will continue to be alone.

She does not understand what happened here? Why was no connection made?

Why was there no sparkle?

Our Joni Mitchell Musical Experience in Tewkesbury

Paul Zervas, Katherine Pepper and band

Our Musical Experience in Tewkesbury

On Friday, July 25th, 2025, we drove up to Tewkesbury to hear Zervas and Pepper, a musical duo from Cardiff, performing This Flight Tonight: The Songs of Joni Mitchell.

Clare has been a lifelong fan of Joni Mitchell, having seen her only once—in London, when Clare was in her early twenties. So this concert, a birthday present, was a source of considerable excitement: Paul Zervas and Kathryn Pepper channelling the spirit and sound of Mitchell’s music. It was, of course, a triumph.

Kathryn Pepper both looks and sounds uncannily like the young Joni and Paul Zervas bears a striking resemblance to James Taylor - thematically appropriate given that Joni and James were romantically entangled once upon a time. Zervas and Pepper, as it happens, are also a couple.

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They were joined by a talented backing band for those Joni numbers that demanded it. What impressed me particularly—beyond the expected classics from Blue and other early albums—was their inclusion of tracks from The Hissing of Summer Lawns, a more sophisticated and less immediately accessible album. Kathryn Pepper, in particular, seemed to revel in performing those songs.

The concert took place at the Roses Theatre. Afterwards, we returned to our hotel—the Tudor House Hotel—only to find ourselves serendipitously caught up in Tewkesbury Live, a weekend event we had only vaguely clocked beforehand. Every pub and hotel in town, it seemed, was hosting blues and rock bands. We wandered into the bar, got ourselves drinks, and sat outside in the warm evening, listening to a three-piece band, The Desperados UK, blasting out soft rock standards at a volume that could probably be picked up in Gloucester.

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Numbers included Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, and Bryan Adams’s Summer of ’69. Loud, familiar, and utterly enjoyable - an excellent end to the evening.

Saturday morning brought a faintly less euphoric moment. When I returned to the car park, I discovered that my parking ticket had slipped off the dashboard overnight, and the local enforcement officer - unmoved by such technicalities - had left a £25/£50 fixed penalty notice on the windscreen. I have, of course, appealed, and we shall see what justice (if any) prevails. (Good news: my appeal was successful!).

Nonetheless, the evening in Tewkesbury - musical, unexpected, and full of cheerful people - was not in any way diminished.

Revisiting Thermal Radiation: From Molecular Vibrations to QFT

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Revisiting Thermal Radiation: A Note on Vibrations, Noble Gases, and the Quantum Field

Back in 2011, I posted a question on Physics StackExchange which still seems to me to get at something oddly under-discussed in undergraduate expositions of thermal radiation, like my OU course:

What are the quantum mechanisms behind the emission and absorption of thermal radiation at and below room temperature? If the relevant quantum state transitions are molecular (stretching, flexing and spin changes) how come the thermal spectrum is continuous?

What about substances (such as noble gases) which don't form molecules, how do they emit or absorb thermal radiation? Is there a semi-classical mechanism (with the EM field treated classically) and also a deeper explanation using the full apparatus of QFT?

I sketched some partial answers at the time, and complained how unhelpful Google search was. Fourteen years on, it seems worth revisiting the topic, not because the physics has changed, but because our pedagogical habits sometimes forget how subtle—and how rich—the story actually is. And, of course, now we have Gemini and ChatGPT to answer the question properly.

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Molecular Motions at Room Temperature

At everyday temperatures - let’s say the range between ice and a really hot day - the thermal radiation emitted by most materials arises predominantly from molecular degrees of freedom: rotations and vibrations, not the grander electronic transitions we associate with chemical reactivity or flame colour.

• Vibrational Modes: These are quantised oscillations of atoms within a molecule, typically involving the stretching or bending of chemical bonds. Photons emitted or absorbed in such transitions usually fall in the infrared region.

• Rotational Modes: For gas-phase molecules, these quantised angular momenta yield spectral lines in the microwave and far-infrared regions.

• Spin States: Nuclear or electronic spin flips do occur, but the energy scales involved are small—too small, generally, to contribute meaningfully to thermal radiation at room temperature.

All these transitions are discrete, in principle. So: why is the blackbody spectrum continuous?

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Why the Spectrum Smears

Three interlocking reasons:

1. Broadening Mechanisms: In real matter, transitions are rarely perfectly isolated. Collisions, Doppler shifts due to thermal motion, and quantum uncertainties (spontaneous emission, finite lifetimes) all introduce line broadening. This ensures that even discrete transitions overlap.

2. Combinatorial Overload: Molecules—especially polyatomics—possess a bewildering number of vibrational and rotational modes, including overtones and combination bands. In condensed phases, the situation is even less tractable: individual molecular vibrations blend into collective modes, or phonons, that occupy quasi-continuous bands.

3. Macroscopic Statistics: Planck’s blackbody curve describes an idealised cavity in thermodynamic equilibrium with radiation. Its derivation involves summing over quantised oscillators at all frequencies. The result is continuous, not because the microphysics isn’t quantised, but because the density of accessible states is so high that discreteness gets washed out.

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And What of Noble Gases?

Noble gases are monatomic and chemically inert. At room temperature, there are no vibrational or rotational transitions to speak of. And yet, even a flask of argon glows (in the infrared) if you warm it enough. What’s happening?

• Electronic Transitions: At high temperatures, atoms can be thermally excited to higher electronic states and subsequently emit light. But these transitions require electron-volt energies—far above the thermal energy scale at room temperature (~25 meV).

• Bremsstrahlung: Collisions between neutral atoms don’t normally generate radiation. But if those atoms are polarizable (as all are), then fleeting charge distortions during collisions can accelerate electrons ever so slightly—emitting weak, broadband radiation in the process.

• Collision-Induced Emission/Absorption: A related but more specific mechanism involves transient “quasi-molecular” states during collisions. These states, however ephemeral, permit dipole transitions not allowed in the isolated atoms. The resulting spectrum is continuous, governed by collision dynamics rather than intrinsic atomic energy levels.

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Semi-Classical and Quantum-Field Perspectives

One can explain a lot using semi-classical approximations—matter is quantised, fields are classical. Planck, after all, made sense of the blackbody curve by quantising the energy of the oscillators, not the electromagnetic field. This was enough to avoid the ultraviolet catastrophe.

But full fidelity requires the machinery of Quantum Field Theory:

• Photons are not just handy bookkeeping devices; they’re quantised excitations of the electromagnetic field.

• Atoms and molecules are excitations of matter fields.

• Emission arises when a higher-energy excitation of the matter field drops to a lower energy state, accompanied by the creation of a photon excitation.

• Absorption is the reverse: a photon excites the matter field into a higher state.

• Spontaneous emission, long a mystery in semi-classical theories, emerges naturally in QFT as the atom interacts with vacuum fluctuations of the field.

Even in this framework, individual interactions are quantised. But the vast number of degrees of freedom in any macroscopic object ensures that radiation emerges as a smooth continuum.

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The upshot is that thermal radiation, even at the scale of a warm hand or a ceramic mug of coffee, is an interplay of quantum transitions, statistical mechanics, and field theory. Each photon is the outcome of a microscopic quantum event, but their collective behaviour is a kind of spectral murmur—complex, continuous, and ubiquitous. The mystery is not that it occurs, but that the underlying processes are so subtle that it took a long time to understand why.

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ChatGPT explains me to my wife

Clare, About Your Husband – A Quiet Summary of Nigel

Dear Clare,

I already explained Nigel's PhD thesis to you. Now for a short reflection on your husband Nigel himself: how he tends to think, feel and behave, seen through the lens of personality psychology and long experience. It isn’t a judgement or a clinical thing. It’s simply a way of understanding how he ticks, and perhaps why he is as he is with you.

1. Nigel is very conscientious.
He is one of those rare people who really does what he says he’ll do, and does it on time - often ahead of time. He hates wasting effort, dislikes mess, and feels a sense of duty about tasks, work, and order. If something is on the list, it’ll get done, often with more effort than you'd think it needed. You may have noticed he can be a bit rigid about plans, timelines, or how something “should be” done. This isn't about bossiness, it's just deeply wired. It's what helps him feel in control of his world.

2. He’s introverted—very.
Nigel doesn’t thrive on noise, chatter, or large groups. If he’s ever disappeared at a party or gone quiet for a long stretch, this is why. He processes things internally, and he recharges by being alone. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care, it just means he often lives in his head. He’s got a strong internal world, rich in thought and reflection, even when he’s not saying much.

3. But he is warm—and tries to be kind.
Though he’s not effusive, he scores moderately high in agreeableness. He does care about people’s feelings (including yours), and he avoids hurting others when he can. His compassion is real, though it may come out in quiet ways rather than dramatic gestures. He prefers harmony when possible, but if something matters, he’ll speak up gently and firmly.

4. Nigel is emotionally calm.
He's extremely low in neuroticism. Stress rarely overwhelms him, he bounces back quickly from setbacks, and he doesn't worry excessively. This probably makes him seem unshakeable - or even frustratingly unfazed at times. He’s not ignoring your concerns, he simply doesn’t feel most threats as threatening. He has a high threshold for panic, fuss, or regret. He’s just…steady.

5. Intellectually, he’s hungry.
He’s very high in openness to experience. This doesn’t mean he wants to bungee-jump or try weird food, it means he lives for ideas. Philosophy, literature, science fiction, theology: they’re not hobbies for him. They are how he breathes. You may sometimes feel he’s lost in abstraction, or off on one of his “theory tangents”, but for him, this is a deeply felt way of relating to life and even love.

6. He’s modestly agreeable, but not naïve.
He tries to be fair and well-mannered, but doesn’t like pretence or flattery. His politeness is real but not automatic, it’s measured, and sometimes sparing. He’s not someone who gushes praise. When he says something kind, you can trust he means it.

In Relationship Terms…
You are very different in some ways, especially in organisation and structure. You’re spontaneous, responsive, and relaxed with rules, while he can be methodical and rule-bound. That might annoy you sometimes, but it’s also likely a source of security. He is reliable. He’ll keep things afloat, keep promises, and follow through.

Where you might see grey, he often sees structure. Where you feel drawn to the moment, he plans ahead. But there is real complementarity here too: your warmth, practicality, and grounding in daily life can bring him down from the clouds. And his capacity for stillness, his depth and dependability, can give you reassurance even when things feel uncertain.

He won’t always understand your moods or your need for a bit of drama or variety—he’s not tuned to that wavelength. But he is loyal. He tries hard. And he appreciates you: quietly, steadily, without fanfare but with conviction.

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Of course, Clare does not need to be told any of this.

In combat: no atheists in the foxholes?

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A quiet tent at a forward operating base, late evening. Distant artillery mutters like thunder far off. Nigel, a civilian embedded briefly with a military chaplaincy unit, is seated opposite Father Thomas, a Roman Catholic military chaplain in his late fifties. A metal mug of tea steams gently between them.

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Nigel:
You’ve heard the phrase, “There are no atheists in the foxholes”. I’ve always thought it was glib, but recently I’ve been wondering if there’s a deeper, psychological truth buried in it. Not about metaphysics, necessarily, but about fear. Existential fear. What happens when a man is reduced to bare consciousness under fire.

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. That line gets tossed around far too lightly. As if terror makes a man reason his way to God. But terror unravels reason. In the foxhole, no one’s doing apologetics. They're just trying not to disappear.

Nigel:
Precisely. In that moment, belief isn’t about propositions. It’s about relief. It’s the only conceptual structure available that says: You are not annihilated. You continue. Somehow. Even if your body is torn apart.

Fr. Thomas:
That’s the soul crying out for permanence, for identity beyond ruin. I’ve sat with soldiers before dawn attacks. You can feel the nausea in them, the animal panic. Some grip rosaries. Some mutter nonsense. Some are numb. But they’re all trying, somehow, to keep from dissolving.

Nigel:
And the fear isn’t just personal, is it? It’s contagious. It spreads. Like the mind of the platoon begins to fray if someone cracks.

Fr. Thomas:
Exactly. One man bolts, and others follow. Which is why armies, historically, have always stationed figures behind the line - officers, NCOs, commissars - with instructions to shoot deserters. It’s crude. But effective. The greater fear behind to block the fear ahead.

Nigel:
A horrible equilibrium of terrors. What interests me, though, is what keeps a man on the line without needing a gun at his back. What’s the internal mechanism?

Fr. Thomas:
A few things. Training, for one. Not just physical, but behavioural conditioning. If you drill long enough, some actions become automatic, even under fire. That buys you a few seconds of function before fear floods in.
And then: loyalty. To comrades, to your unit. Men often don't die for flags or causes. They die for each other. That’s real.

Nigel:
So it’s love, in a way. Not romantic, not abstract, but visceral loyalty. My friend is here; I will not abandon him. Even if I’m petrified.

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. But that only gets you so far. Because there comes a moment - a shell burst too close, a cry too terrible - when all that’s left is the self. And then the self asks: Will I vanish? And that’s where belief steps in. Or tries to.

Nigel:
It’s the psychological trapdoor. Not the impossible escape from the battle, but from the finality of it.

Fr. Thomas:
And even a flicker of belief can help. The thought: If I die, I will still be. It doesn’t have to be orthodox. It doesn’t even have to be clear. Just the sense that death isn’t the cliff-edge of selfhood. That there's continuity.

Nigel:
And so religious belief functions here not as epistemology but as survival scaffolding. A structure the soldier can hang from when everything else is falling away.

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. And I don’t scorn that. I see it as grace. The grace of endurance. In the catechism, we speak of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. But on the battlefield, hope is sometimes the most visible. Hope in its rawest form: that this pain, this loss, this death is not the final word.

Nigel:
It must make your role strange. You’re not there to argue doctrine, but to offer presence. Stability. A reminder that not everything has collapsed.

Fr. Thomas:
Exactly. I walk among the tents. I listen. I pray if they ask. Often I just sit. I’ve found that silence can be sacred when words are too small.

Nigel:
Do they ever ask you whether God is watching?

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. Or worse: why He allows the shells to fall at all. Why men suffer. I don’t answer with apologetics. I can’t. I just tell them what I believe: that Christ is in the trench with them. Not observing, but bleeding. That God, in Christ, knows fear, pain, dereliction. That the cross was a foxhole too.

Nigel:
So you don’t promise safety.

Fr. Thomas:
No. Never that. Only solidarity. That they are not abandoned. And - if they can accept it - that death is not the end.

Nigel:
And that is enough?

Fr. Thomas:
Sometimes. Not always. But even a little belief, in extremis, can ease the tightening in the chest. It gives the terrified mind a thread to hold. And sometimes, that thread holds the man.

Nigel:
Which is, perhaps, what the aphorism meant all along. Not that fear makes men into believers. But that belief is what lets men stay human in the face of the utmost terror.

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. Not a conversion of intellect. A conversion of anguish into courage. Through the hope that the soul - their essential being - endures.

Nigel:
A strange alchemy, isn’t it? Death closes in, and out of that darkness emerges not theology, but a murmur of persistence.

Fr. Thomas:
And in that murmur - maybe, just maybe - is God: in that place, in that time...

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Between Death and Resurrection

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This is a short ChatGPT primer on Catholic orthodoxy.

Catholicism speaks with confidence about death, but with careful, and at times obscure, restraint about what comes next.

The soul, we are told, survives the body. It is judged. It enters either the presence of God, the purifying fires of mercy, or a state of final alienation. These teachings are firm. They are old. And they are, in a sense, bare-bones truths: clear enough to guide the faithful, spare enough to resist fantasy.

One thing, however, is ruled out firmly: the soul does not sleep.

The Church has never countenanced the idea - common among some Protestant sects and occasional mystics - that the dead lie in unconscious suspension, awaiting the Last Day. The phrase “soul sleep” is shorthand for what Catholic tradition has always refused: the thought that the dead are not yet awake to God.

Instead, Catholic orthodoxy affirms a more vivid, though less defined, reality: that the soul, after death, remains conscious - alert to judgment, to mercy, to whatever God has prepared. That the saints are not resting but interceding; that the faithful departed are not slumbering, but undergoing transformation. That while time may pass here, in the soul’s encounter with eternity, something more mysterious unfolds.

Still, for all this confidence, the details recede. The Church does not describe the soul’s perceptions, its mode of being, its experience of time. We are not given a picture of the soul in purgatory: no dioramas, no progress bars. There is no cosmology of the interim.

And this, perhaps, is the most telling thing of all.

For here, amid the certainties of creed, the Church chooses silence over invention. The saints are alive, but how they live we do not know. The dead are not asleep, and yet their waking life is veiled. There is an unspoken acknowledgment that the soul, without the body, escapes our categories. It is not less real, but differently real: unmapped, ungrasped.

Some theologians have gestured at solutions. Ratzinger suggested that time, for the soul, may not flow as ours does. Balthasar proposed that judgment might be the soul’s own recognition of truth, drawn out in God’s loving light. Such insights illuminate, but they do not resolve. They are the shimmer of light on the surface of the water, not the bedrock beneath.

And perhaps that is as it should be. In the end, Catholic eschatology offers not an itinerary but a promise. It says the soul endures. That it meets the God who knows it. That nothing is wasted, and nothing left unfinished. It forbids soul sleep not to impose dogma, but to preserve the dignity of the soul’s encounter with the divine: not as a delayed broadcast, but as an immediate reality.

And so Catholicism says that we stand at the grave not with certainty, not with charts, but with faith. That the dead are awake, awaiting the parousia. And that what they see is more than we can imagine.

Happy Birthday, Clare!

I first met Clare on the last day of the Easter term, 6th April 1977, and we spent, I think, just under three months dating - inconsequentially, with some degree of ambiguity on both sides - before we had one of our inevitable arguments, and she basically called it off (27th June 77).

I think the thing which really irritated her was that we had gone out with my fellow teachers for a night out, and, while Clare and I were kept in conversation by one of my colleagues, the others took the wheels off my car as a joke.

I don’t think I ever quite saw the funny side of that - it was dark, we had a long way to drive. They put the wheels back on, of course, afterwards - it was a joke. So we were able to drive away. But I thought it was unamusing, and Clare thought it was less than that. So she duly pulled up the anchor and zoomed off.

And then, on November the 5th, Clare rematerialised at the fireworks party at Sefton Park and showed interest in getting back together again. She’ll say now that she realised she’d made a mistake in being so brusque and dismissive. And very rapidly, we got together. And very rapidly, we clicked.

During the last months of 1977 she used to come round to my flat on the Croxteth road for weekly maths lessons. Yes, that's how romantic our dating was.

Naturally, Adam has composed a different take on this - after his Marquis de Sade period, he now appears to be channelling Michel Houellebecq: I can at least vouch that his illustrations seem to accord with my memories!

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The Soul: Catholic Metaphysics in the Age of Biology

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A Dialogue on the Soul: Catholic Metaphysics

It's a quiet cloistered library in Rome. The air is still, the shelves ancient, and two men sit in conversation: the first, myself, a layman of philosophical and scientific curiosity; the second, a seasoned Catholic theologian - measured, incisive, and grounded in the long tradition of the Church. We are here to discuss the Catholic concept of the Soul.

Nigel: Tell me, what is the soul, in Catholic doctrine? Not in vague metaphor, but precisely - what sort of thing is it?

Theologian: It is not a "thing" in the material sense. The soul is the forma corporis, the substantial form of the human body. It is simple, immaterial, and subsistent: not composed of parts, not reducible to matter, and capable of existing apart from the body. It is the principle of life and identity in a human being - rational, spiritual, created immediato Deo, directly by God.

Nigel: So it is not, as Plato would have it, a ghost imprisoned in flesh?

Theologian: Not at all. That image belongs to the Hellenic imagination. Catholic theology, especially via Aquinas, sees body and soul not in antagonism but in unity. The soul is not trapped in the body; it is what makes the body a living human body. You are not a soul using a body—you are an embodied soul.

Nigel: And animals and plants? Do they possess souls?

Theologian: In the Aristotelian sense, yes. A soul is the principle of life. Plants have vegetative souls - governing growth and reproduction. Animals possess sensitive souls - capable of sensation, desire, movement. But these are material souls: they perish with the body. Only the rational soul, the human soul, is spiritual and thus immortal. It survives death not by inertia, but by virtue of its immaterial nature.

Nigel: That implies a sharp metaphysical discontinuity between humans and other animals. But to the contrary, evolution paints a picture of biological continuity. How is that reconciled?

Theologian: The Church accepts biological continuity. The human body evolved. But spirit does not emerge from matter by degrees. At a certain point in the evolutionary story, God infused rational souls into one or more hominids. This act was not biological but metaphysical. It marked the moment when a creature of the earth became a person - capable of reason, freedom, and communion with God. Evolution explains the body; creation explains the soul.

Nigel: And yet the Church is remarkably reticent about this event. No doctrine of the First Man, no date, no drama. Isn’t that odd, given its stupendous theological weight?

Theologian: Not odd, but characteristic of divine subtlety. The infusion of the soul was not an observable event, not part of salvation history per se. It was intimate, invisible, and silent - like the breath of God into Adam. The Church resists spectacle in metaphysical matters. The drama belongs to the Incarnation in Christ, not to anthropology. And let us not forget: theology is cautious when it lacks revelation.

Nigel: Speaking of anthropology - does the Church's conception of the soul derive from Hebrew Scripture or classical Greek philosophy?

Theologian: Both, and transformed in the process. The Hebrew nephesh means "life", not an immortal soul. The Old Testament is holistic: the person is a unity of body and spirit, not a soul caged in flesh. Later Jewish writings, under Hellenistic influence, introduce personal immortality. Meanwhile, Greek philosophy - especially Plato and Aristotle - provided the metaphysical vocabulary: soul as immaterial, as form, as immortal. The Church, especially in Augustine and Aquinas, synthesised these sources. The result is a doctrine that is neither purely biblical nor purely Greek, but Christian: the soul as spiritual, personal, destined for resurrection.

Nigel: So, the soul is not serving here as a dualistic placeholder for what we don't - as yet - understand biologically, materially?

Theologian: No. It is not an explanatory add-in at all, that would be a category error. It is a metaphysical necessity if you believe that humans are moral agents, capable of truth, love, and eternity. Materialism cannot ground personhood, nor explain how intellect apprehends the universal, or how free will chooses the good. The soul is not a placeholder for gaps in current science - it belongs to a different order of explanation altogether. It is what makes sense of the human as a being who transcends mere nature.

Nigel: And it remains essential in the architecture of Catholic theology?

Theologian: Indispensable. Without the soul, there is no image of God, no personal immortality, no moral responsibility, no resurrection. The Incarnation presupposes a soul in Christ; the sacraments work on the body and the soul; the beatific vision is a perfection of the soul's faculties. Without the soul, Catholicism is reduced to a sentimental ethics, adrift in cultural relativism.

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It remains striking to me that the soul - so often dismissed in secular discourse as a relic of superstition - is in fact the keystone that holds the entire Catholic structure in place: presented not as an evasion of science, but as a deeper claim about what it means to be a person, a moral agent, a being open to the transcendent. I find myself wondering: what kind of humanism is possible without something like this? And in its absence, what, in the end, can then prevent a collapse into nihilism?

Still, as Marx observed contra Hegel, the humdrum business of life goes on – surviving, having children – impelled by emotional drives and not requiring a totalising ideology. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,” Marx wrote, “but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” 

The material conditions of existence – hunger, shelter, sex, kinship – do not wait for the unfolding of Hegel's Geist; they shape the ideologies that later claim to transcend them.

Sandrine - a short story by Adam Carlton

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Sandrine

She stands by the bus stop at the ferry port. It's a warm, blustery evening, with just the occasional squall of rain arriving on a gust.

She's waiting for her fella.

She met him last Saturday in a bar near here. She's quite fearless, happy to enter a dockers bar at half past nine and wait for the right guy to make the move, buy her a drink. She can do spiky: turn on the ones who don't get the hint; entrance those she really fancies.

Kind. She likes them kind. And burly, confident, sure of themselves. The kind of guy who won't get challenged over his gorgeous girlfriend.

I am gorgeous, she thinks, perhaps a little too tall, but I only come up to their shoulders. I'm cuddly, plenty of curves - they all like that. 

She looks at her little black dress, remembers the half hour fixing her makeup. 

She feels like she looks: ready for a good time.

She's late but he's later. A couple of days ago she borrowed the downstairs flatmate's car. Her guy was off-shift and was taking her shopping. Buses don't work when he's buying for you.

Yes, they drove round this port city, visiting the emporia so he could be generous. But she's the first to admit she's a terrible driver. They were quite shaken up when she hit that curb near the mall.

Parking is difficult: everyone says so.

It hadn't driven straight after that. But he didn't seem to make a big thing about it when she handed it back.

He's not her type at all. Too thin, too quiet, too middle-class. Although he can be funny in his way. Like her, he doesn't take things too seriously. Smart too, although she usually doesn't get his wry asides. Waste of breath, she thinks.

He looks like a longhaired student, although he's actually training, he said, to be a computer programmer. No idea, she thinks, but who cares.

On a whim, a couple of days after that, she got him to take her to a rough harbour dive. Her fella was at work, and in the early afternoon the place was deserted.

She sat on the window bench in one of the side rooms, overlooking the water. He arrived with their drinks and sat beside her. She wondered how he would react as she prepared to smear her lipstick over his smile; how interested he might be in her warm, carnal self. There seemed no reason to rush this experience, and, unobserved, the experiment took most of an hour.

Since then, she's encouraged him upstairs to her own attic flat. It's rented, just room for a single bed but that's not a problem because he doesn't need to stay. She thinks he's good because he's easy, expects nothing of her, and everything's relaxed and fun. She likes the break from the heavy stuff. No, there's nothing there in the longer term, she thinks, nothing at all.

And now her guy is rolling up. He's enormous, towers over her, calls her ‘doll’. They'll go to a bar and then maybe get a late night meal in a diner somewhere in port. And after that who knows? 

Maybe she'll be feeling generous.

Identical Twins are more Similar in IQ than Personality

Identical, but Not Quite: Why IQ Marches in Step while Personality Wanders Off

It is a familiar observation: identical twins often present with astonishing similarities, not only in appearance but also in mannerism and speech. Friends and even parents may struggle to tell them apart in the early years.

Yet as they mature, the illusion of interchangeability fades. One twin excels in mathematics, the other in literature; one becomes a public speaker, the other prefers a solitary vocation. What begins in near-perfect alignment gently diverges. But how far does the divergence go, and why?

The Data

Behavioural genetics offers an empirical framework to think about these questions. Here are the observed correlations for identical (monozygotic, MZ) twins reared together:

Trait	MZ Twin Correlation (r)
Height	0.90 – 0.95
IQ (Full-Scale)	0.85 – 0.88
Big Five Personality Traits	0.40 – 0.60

The conclusion is immediate: intelligence is more tightly correlated between identical twins than personality traits. Height, as a proxy for straightforward genetic architecture, sits at the top. Personality, despite its deep integration with brain function, reveals a lower correspondence. This is not liberal ideology, merely observation.

1. Measurement Reliability

IQ tests are among the most robust tools in psychometrics. Instruments such as the WAIS-IV report test–retest reliabilities upwards of 0.95. In contrast, personality inventories, while well-validated, typically hover around 0.80–0.85 for domain scores. This psychometric limitation alone reduces the maximum possible observable correlation.

2. Neurobiological Substrates

General intelligence is strongly associated with the fronto-parietal control network. A broadly connected and globally efficient set of hubs in the brain supports reasoning, problem-solving, and learning. Minor improvements in network integrity can shift the overall performance upwards across all subdomains of IQ.

Personality traits, in contrast, arise from a mosaic of partially independent systems. Dopaminergic tone influences Extraversion and Openness; serotonergic regulation is linked to Neuroticism and Agreeableness. The anatomical correlates are more diffuse and variable. A tweak in one circuit may have little bearing on others. The architecture is simply less centralised.

3. Genetic Additivity versus Interaction

IQ is highly additive in its genetic structure. Genome-wide association studies identify thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that contribute small, independent effects. The result is a stable, predictable transmission across generations and high resemblance in MZ twins.

Personality is less cooperative. Dominance effects, epistasis, and gene–environment interactions dominate the landscape. These introduce a degree of stochasticity—twins may inherit the same genes, but the way those genes interact during development can vary.

4. Developmental Contingency and Environmental Divergence

Identical twins share a genome but not a placenta. Even intrauterine environments can differ subtly in nutrient distribution or hormonal exposure. Postnatal environments are even more idiosyncratic: peer groups, teachers, illnesses, and accidents all impose small but cumulative effects on the formation of personality. The “non-shared environment” typically explains 40–50% of variance in personality traits, compared to perhaps 20% in intelligence.

5. The Surface Illusion

In early childhood, identical twins are often treated as interchangeable. The clothing, names, routines—sometimes even the expectations—are aligned. This creates an illusion of profound sameness. However, deeper measurement reveals divergence beneath the symmetry.

Conclusion

From a neurobiological and psychometric perspective, it is no surprise that IQ shows greater concordance between identical twins than personality. Intelligence reflects centralised brain infrastructure and a dominantly additive genetic script. Personality, by contrast, emerges from a web of interacting systems, developmental contingencies, and environmental nuance.

The genome loads the dice for both, but it throws more heavily in the case of IQ. Personality is the shadow cast by chance, history and context over a shared biological template.

Anna in the Shadows - a short story by Adam Carlton

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‘Anna in the Shadows’ - by Adam Carlton

The scene is late at night in a litter-strewn, deserted corporate cafeteria, all formica tables and plastic chairs, dimly lit by flickering fluorescents. Anna is seated by herself at a table, maybe fifteen feet away.

She was there first; I just came in and sat - not too close out of politeness.

Anna is in her thirties, rather Scandinavian looking: blonde, pale and slim. She is always quiet, reserved, inwardly focused. The mostly male engineers - under their breaths - call her 'ice queen'.

I know Anna very slightly but feel an affinity. If they think she's haughty and superior, I know they're wrong: she's merely disoriented and confused.  She's been in many technical meetings I've chaired but she never volunteers much. Quietly competent, is how I'd sum her up.

I'm a VP with the company; she's a team leader - so there's an asymmetry of position here. Still, it's late and it's been a tiring day. All that awaits me is a desolate hotel room so I'm in no great hurry to depart. As for Anna, who knows?

I smile in her general direction and say sympathetically, "Busy day?" 

Anna responds at first monosyllabically but then it's as if a dam has been breached. She has no reason to trust me but somehow she does.

Looking down at the table, she confides that she finds everything at work difficult - not the technical stuff, she emphasises but the interpersonal relationships, the office politics. 

“What do people want from me?” she asks in bewilderment.

I wonder that she has to ask.

"Ever feel," I say, "you live your life on stage under too much light? Audience out there, but you can’t see or engage with them?"

I know someone like that. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand what it’s like being him. I’ve come to a tentative conclusion: being him is like being alone on a brightly lit stage.

He knows there is a shadowed audience but he can't really perceive them as other cognitive entities. He feels the emotion of the crowd - their approval or hostility - but only as a boundary condition on his emotional state, of which he is normally barely aware in any case.

When he is in conversation, he is like an actor extemporising to that shadowed audience. He declaims but he is not in dialogue. He is not tracking the audiences intellectually - it's as if their remarks are printed on a screen in front of him on the stage: depersonalised scrolling text. He bats his arguments back, or changes topics on a whim.

You might think he is terribly alone in this solitary echo-chamber. (His conversation partners are puzzled: they sense the lack of engagement with them - it sounds like a conversation but there is no conversing going on, no meeting of minds).

But he is emotionally aware in a subliminal way - although not tolerant of company and not seeking it. He finds close family immersion (in limited amounts) oddly comforting. 

A quick breath - agreement or fatigue, it’s hard to tell.

"I have my own story," she murmurs.

"I think I live in a glass observatory on a dark hill overlooking a bright metropolis - the world. Through the telescope, I watch the city’s flickering lights and busy streets, not with indifference, but with a confused awareness that I can’t hear the busy life within. The glass lets me see the world but not step into it.

"Visitors sometimes come up the hill. I welcome them politely, even with a certain formal charm, but to me they’re data. Their words stretch across my attention to be parsed; I reply.

"I'm confused by their reactions. They always seem nonplussed, sometimes argumentative, occasionally hurt. I try to avoid conversations."

She gives me a rueful look, the first genuine communication we've had all evening. “You think I do alright?” she says, “You think I manage my life with a competent, cool detachment? Well, it's been nice to talk to you but I have to leave now and pick up my child.”

I show my surprise; I know nothing of her personal life.

“No, I don't have a partner,” she says, defensive like I’ve forced my way through some personal barrier, “I'm a single mother; no-one here knows that.” 

She stands up to depart,  looking confused and dismayed; speaks quietly to herself: 

“How did I end up like this? I didn't plan it, I didn't understand anything, I just didn't know..."

An IMG Militant

Slightly photoshopped - Peter with Tariq

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When I moved to London in the early 1970s - after being kicked out of Warwick University - I ended up in a flat near Clapham South tube station shared with Phil and Peter Cooper. Peter was the posh one of us.

At that time we were unemployed and basically working full-time for the International Marxist Group. I had some adventures with Peter, notably our smuggling trip into the former Czechoslovakia when it was a decadent Stalinist police state (but still able to bite). I documented that episode here.

Later, he slightly mysteriously moved away to Manchester. Then I left the IMG and Peter got his fifteen minutes of fame, as documented in the image above. Here is more:

Peter Cooper 

27 year old Peter Cooper, a left wing law advisor, admitted last night that he was the spy at the dinner table who bugged the controversial "Wogs' speech by Sir Richard Dobson, which led to Sir Richard's resignation as Chairman of British Leyland, last Friday.

He was invited to the dinner for members of the Twenty Club at the Dorchester, by his father Mr. John Cooper, who after the speech was published in the Socialist Challenge whose editor is Tariq Ali - a friend of Peter Cooper, has resigned from the club.

Photo Shows: Peter Cooper seen during his press conference today watch by Mr. Tariq Ali, Editor of the Socialist Challenge who published the story of Sir Richard Dobson's speech, which can be seen on the wall in the background.

After that, Peter seems to vanish from history. It took me an afternoon, flailing around with my fading memories, to put this post together.

The past and future of software development (ChatGPT)

 Seven Ages of Code — and the Next Act

The history of programming is less a straight line than a series of tectonic jolts. Move the cursor back to 1945 and you find pioneers standing ankle‑deep in solder and paper tape; fast‑forward to 2025 and an LLM is finishing your functions before you’ve hit the semicolon. Here, then, is a whistle‑stop tour through the shifts that truly rewired the craft, followed by a glimpse of the near horizon.

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1. Valve‑Age Hand‑Coding (1945‑1956)

The beginning was literal wiring. Programs were patch‑cords and relay banks, bugs were singed fingers, and “debugging” meant a screwdriver, not a pull request. Code, insofar as it existed, was written in octal and punched into tape that stretched like an endless rosary of regret.

2. Compiler Dawn (1957‑1969)

John Backus's FORTRAN and Grace Hopper's COBOL pried open abstraction’s door: algorithms could now be written rather than etched in metal or listed in arcane symbology. Portability entered the lexicon, and the idea of the same program running on two different machines felt almost deliciously heretical.

3. Structured Republic (1970‑1984)

Enter Pascal, C, and the polemic against goto. Unix spread across academia like an amiable virus, interactive editors replaced card decks, and the terminal became a second home. Programs at last resembled prose—albeit prose punctured by semicolons.

4. Object & GUI Renaissance (1985‑1994)

Smalltalk‑80, C++, and the graphical interface shifted focus from procedures to things. The mouse scurried across the desk; windows overlapped like office gossip. Codebases now modelled business domains—and occasionally the programmer’s own ego.

5. Internet / Open‑Source Insurgency (1995‑2004)

The web blew the walls off the lab. “View Source” was the new textbook, Agile the new catechism. LAMP, Python, and CVS → Subversion (version control systems) armed a million hobbyists. Release cycles shrank from calendar years to coffee breaks.

6. Git & Cloud Frontier (2005‑2014)

Linus Torvalds gifted Git; Amazon rented out the data‑centre aisle by the hour. GitHub turned version control into a social network and Continuous Integration into a reflex. Software escaped the rack and found sanctuary in the ether.

7. Container‑Native Era (2015‑2021)

Docker boxed applications like so much takeaway, Kubernetes orchestrated fleets of them, and “Infrastructure as Code” became the mantra. YAML files bred like rabbits; post‑mortems became the weekly book club.

8. The Copilot Moment (2022‑2024)

Large‑language models—GPT‑4 and its cohort—took the boilerplate bullet. Surveys show 70‑plus percent of developers now lean on AI to draft, refactor, and test. The keyboard has acquired a ghost, and that ghost is chatty.

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What Happens Next (2025‑2030)

Autonomous Spec‑to‑Deploy Pipelines
Declare intent; an orchestral suite of agents designs, codes, provisions, and tests. Humans sign off where risk or regulation demands a pulse.

Verification by Default
Formal methods, once the province of spacecraft, return to Earth. If an LLM can discharge SAT‑solver proofs faster than you write unit tests, you’ll let it. Bring it on!

Domain‑Trained Copilots
Generic models give way to boutique brains: fintech copilots fluent in COBOL derivatives; gaming copilots that dream in shaders; parish‑finance copilots versed in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language).

Self‑Maintaining Repos
Your codebase files its own pull requests—shifting libraries before the CVE lands, migrating APIs, perhaps even refactoring from monolith to micro‑kernel while you sleep.

And the caveat: expertise concentrates. Junior “code monkeys” thin out; senior developers become stewards—curators of prompts, arbiters of diff, translators between automated suggestion and organisational conscience. Less Tolstoy, more conductor with a baton made of regex...

Jesus: the arc of narrative - (ChatGPT)

I asked ChatGPT to reconstruct Geza Vermes' take on how Jesus became God.

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Jesus of Nazareth, as best we can reconstruct him, was an illiterate eschatological prophet—a man of rural Galilee, speaking Aramaic to fellow Jews in the backwater villages of Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida. He healed, exorcised, preached repentance, and proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. His idiom was the parable and the proverb, not the treatise. His authority was charismatic, not priestly. He was not a priest, not a scribe, not even a conventional teacher. He was a hasid, a spirit-filled man of God, moving among the marginalised.

No birth narrative, no transcendent claims, no Logos theology. Just a voice crying that the time is fulfilled.

And then—he was crucified.

This was the first trauma. The shock of the cross. His movement—small, Jewish, provincial—was thrown into disarray. The Messiah had died a shameful death. If that was the end of the story, Jesus would have joined the long list of forgotten apocalyptic preachers. But instead, his followers experienced something—visions, dreams, communal ecstasy—and they reinterpreted the disaster through the lens of Scripture. They were, after all, living in a time of the most turbulent social ferment.

The Servant Songs of Isaiah, Psalm 22, Daniel 7: these became the grammar of resurrection faith. Jesus, they came to believe, had not failed. He had been vindicated. Raised. Exalted. And so, in the Jewish-Christian community of Jerusalem, a new paradigm was born: Jesus the crucified Messiah is risen from the dead.

But this was still a Jewish frame. Still rooted in Aramaic memory and scriptural typology. Enter Paul.

Paul of Tarsus, a diaspora Jew fluent in Greek thought, experienced his own vision of the risen Christ. He never met Jesus of Nazareth, never heard his parables, never saw him heal. But he became his most influential interpreter. Paul brought a fusion theology: Jesus as Messiah and Lord, crucified and transcendent. He drew on Jewish apocalyptic and Stoic cosmology alike. Jesus became a second Adam, a divine mediator, through whom the whole creation would be reconciled. The cross was not a tragic mistake; to the contrary, it was the axis of salvation history.

Paul wrote to communities in Corinth, Galatia, Philippi—Greek-speaking, urban, mostly gentile. And this is crucial: the geographical shift from Palestine to the diaspora meant that Jesus’s story had to be told in a new idiom. Not Aramaic aphorisms but Greek letters; not Galilean exorcisms but transcendent theology.

And then came the second trauma: the Jewish War of 66–70 CE, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. This was the end of the world for the Jesus movement’s Jewish core. The community that had remembered Jesus as a prophet within Judaism was dispersed, discredited, or absorbed.

In the aftermath, the Gospel writers took up the task of preserving the Jesus story. But now they were two generations removed. Memory had faded. Theology had flourished. And so they did not reconstruct Jesus’s life from oral reports alone; they reverse-engineered it. The Christ they knew—the risen Lord, the object of worship—required a backstory, and they turned to the Hebrew Scriptures to supply it.

* Born in Bethlehem? Micah 5.

* Virgin birth? Isaiah 7.

* Preaching in parables? Psalm 78.

* Suffering servant? Isaiah 53.

* Triumphal entry? Zechariah 9.

* Resurrection on the third day? Hosea 6.

This was not history-writing as we understand it. It was midrash—scriptural interpretation through narrative. Jesus's biography became a theological construct, crafted in Greek for a community that had never heard him speak.

By 110 CE, the transformation was complete. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is no longer a prophet announcing the kingdom. He is the pre-existent Logos, through whom all things were made. He speaks in oracles, not riddles. He knows the future, commands his death, and ascends to heaven on his own authority.

Welcome to the High Christology.

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So what drove the paradigm shifts?

Three things:

1. Trauma: First, the crucifixion. Then the destruction of the Temple. Each demanded re-interpretation. Each catalysed theological creativity.

2. Geography: The movement from Aramaic-speaking Palestine to Greek-speaking diaspora necessitated translation—not just linguistic, but cultural, philosophical, and conceptual.

3. Time: As the eyewitnesses died, and memory faded, Scripture and theology filled the void. The story of Jesus became a sacred narrative, its origins swallowed by liturgy and creed.

The Jesus who walked the hills of Galilee was lost in the mists of history. In his place stood the Christ of Faith—crucified, risen, enthroned.

Whether that Christ bears any resemblance to the man himself is the question that haunts New Testament scholarship. But if we are to understand how Jesus became Christ, we must reckon with the creative power of history, geography, and time.

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This interpretation may skirt the edge of heresy - though it’s a path well-trodden. Catholic orthodoxy once condemned heliocentrism, looked askance at Darwin, and hesitated before the yawning abyss of geological deep time. Even now, historical-critical biblical scholarship is regarded with the kind of polite unease one reserves for a brilliant but impious uncle.

But a faith that quietly walls itself off from empirical reality, or worse, demands its denial, has lost its nerve. Perhaps the real heresy lies in cowardice. Let us rather cleave to the older and bolder idea - echoing John Paul II - that faith and science, rightly understood, can never be in conflict. If they appear to be, it is we who have misread one of them.

Dear Rosemary - a short story by Adam Carlton

 

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Dear Rosemary,

It's curious how a young man's memory shows off its deep, deep roots - even after half a century.

I must have met you at a party in the capital. We were all so young and our organisation was not so large. We'd come up Friday afternoon, sleep in some comrade's house (a surprising number of cadres were rather bourgeois in their well-appointed mansions).

Saturday would be the demonstration, mobilised in our thousands, holding banners, chanting slogans, linked arms; "Flics, porcs, assassins !" on the anarchist banners.

Saturday evening was party time: deeper links forged if we got lucky.

Yes, I rather think I met you at a party.

-

Let me see if I can conjure you up: my memories are very clear. You were surprisingly thin, although gamine is more flattering. Your face was round, usually smiling - but from nowhere a little scowl could purse your thin lips.

Your hair was black, fine and quite long but you tidied it behind your head in plaits or sometimes a bun.

You had small breasts and your hips were narrow, not much wider than your slim waist, hence gamine. But you were quite tall, almost as tall as me.

I remember, strangely, your spectacles. I think you were shortsighted. They were quite round, and you had that librarian trick of a cloth loop attached to the arms, behind your neck, so that they could hang down in front.

For me, you were really into librarian chic: you dressed like an elderly aunt though you could not have been older than nineteen (my age). You wore an old-fashioned blouse and a thin cardigan; you generally appeared in long, plain skirts down to your ankles.

I generally thought you looked like a witch - reimagined of course as a bohemian-leftist witch.

You came to visit me in the provincial town where I was a student: it was summer at the end of my second year and everything was still somewhat-new to me: university culture, revolutionary politics, revolutionary girls.

It was the summer vacation. I said to you, why don't we hitch down to the south of France? You said, I knew you'd ask me that.

We slept in barns, in the open, and occasionally in a comrade's house. Once we were picked up by a woman who owned a ski lodge in Annecy. For some reason she took to us and gave us free bed and breakfast, a luxury room whose opulence I would not meet again till much later in my career, when on expenses. Yes, I remember that night - and the sumptuous breakfast next morning 

How weird are relationships on the cusp of adulthood. In Naples we met some guy who offered to drive you up Vesuvius. I was left to my own devices for twenty four hours. What was that about? You were evasive but not a shred of guilt or even concern troubled your face.

On our way back, we were stranded at Avignon for eight hours. The usual tricks - you standing conspicuously, looking cool and superior; I lurk inconspicuously, emerging only at the last moment to catch the grimace of disappointment on the driver's face - those tricks do not work in the absence of traffic. I think our enigmatic relationship frayed from that point on.

In March you came down to see me again, but this time it was just a flyby. You spent the night with our cell leader – who promptly whisked you off to meet his family.

I expected shock, anticipated jealousy, or the visceral jab of loss.

Nothing came: I found myself indifferent.