BUSES AND TRAINS

Vegan Buses

As the buses stand waiting for the traffic lights to change outside the Parish Office I often read the adverts on their sides; "La La Land" is being well-promoted. In the last few days adverts have appeared from a vegan organisation, GoVeganWorld.com, which have come as quite a surprise. There is one with a cute calf being nuzzled by its cuddly mother and the message "Dairy takes babies from their mothers". Now this irritates me on several levels. First, there's the sentimental anthropomorphizing; "babies". No. Baby as a noun refers to human infants; we might indeed talk about baby calves, but that's using baby as an adjective, because what you are talking about is a calf. The cute picture is part of the sentimentalizing as well, the attempt to provoke an emotional rather than a rational response. Then there's the assumed high moral tone, the implication that  vegans are more moral than the rest of us. Most of all, though, I object to the idea that this is about animal welfare, when it manifestly isn't: if the dairy industry is abolished the result will not be lots of happy cows, but lots of dead cows, and then no cows at all, because why would there be any cows if we weren't milking them? If existence is better than non-existence (which seems to me to be a fairly uncontroversial point of view) then veganism, which implies the extermination of all farm animal species, can hardly claim moral superiority. Of course humans have obligations to treat other sentient beings responsibly and kindly but it's perfectly possible to have a dairy industry and an egg industry that aren't cruel; cruelty and abuse are not inherent in consuming milk or eggs. The extermination of whole species really would be implied if the world did truly go vegan!


Thanks To Keble

Last week I had a couple of very pleasant days at Keble College, Oxford. Keble are the patrons of the living of St Mary Mags, which in the past meant that they appointed the vicar; nowadays it's all more consultative, but they still have a role. Like good patrons they want to support their incumbents, and so put on a biennial conference for us, and that was what I went to last week. We heard from two CSMV sisters about prayer, which was helpful, and it was a good opportunity for me to re-establish links with them, as CSMV sisters worked in the parish for many decades, up to the 1950s, and it would be very good to get them involved in the heritage project. It was great to meet other Keble incumbents, and encouraging to see priests with a very wide range of experience, and lots of learning. It was also good to meet a couple of ordinands who are at Keble, and the Chaplain, also Fr Everett (though he rejoices in the Christian name Nevsky).


New Lines

Going to Oxford I tried for myself the new route from Marylebone, and can thoroughly recommend it. There is a half-hourly service, which is as quick as the First Great Western trains from Paddington, and they are pleasantly uncrowded. The grotesque overcrowding on the Paddington-Oxford trains has been a feature of the line for years, so this great boost in capacity is very welcome. The stop on the new curve at Bicester is for Bicester Village, the vastly popular retail outlet centre, and you can tell where its popularity comes from by the fact that the on-train announcements when you get there are in Arabic and Chinese as well as English!  Sensible enterprise from Chiltern Rail.