Day 17 Part 2 - On Ryde

(continued from Part One)

I took the pricey catamaran ferry to Ryde (10.80GBP for an 18-minute ride) and walked along the pier into the once highly-fashionable resort. The picture shows it's not so posh today. Ryde boasts some splendid Edwardian homes but my budget guest house was among the more modest buildings.

I dined around the corner in a restaurant whose chairs were vinyl-covered pads sitting on the same welded frames that supported the melamine table tops. Cod, chips and peas and my first cup of tea for three weeks, all for less than a fiver.

I fell asleep to sounds I'd never heard in France, the drunken screams and shouts of British youth at play.

My walking verse for the day was Psalm 115.7: [False idols] have hands but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; they make no sound in their throats.

I thought of the human preference for worshipping idols of our own creation. Conan Doyle's brilliantly creative powers led him to imagine all sorts of weird aspects of the spirit world and he convinced himself into a very strange worldview.

David Icke is the Leicester-born one time Coventry City goalkeeper, BBC reporter and Green Party spokesperson who made his own extraordinary journey into self-deception in the 1980s. He now lives in Ryde and has written over forty books, claiming that he has specially-revealed knowledge about the mysterious illuminati conspiracy which he claims rules the word, at the behest of alien overlords.

Mute and lame idols have certain advantages as objects of worship. Pocket-sized or conveniently permanent, they can be implored at will to serve the ends of the hands that made them. So ironically, idols lend back the power invested in them to their human owners and handlers. But worship of the one true God must include knowledge of our smallness, of ourselves as creatures, not creators. Walking before God can be, I'm discovering, a little step along that road.