A dish like your favourite cardigan

Pyracantha berries – nearly ready for the birds

We studied a number of the poems of Keats during my schooling, but with the exception of this first stanza of Ode to Autumn, from 1819, they made me gurn at the mawkishness of them.

This, on the other hand, had something sensual about it; something of the voluptuousness of the season.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the mos’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

The third of the stanzas in that Keats ode deals with the dying of the year.

Looking back on it, I can see why I didn’t appreciate that bit of the work as much: for a teenager growing up in a family that was far too absorbed with death and guilt and sin, it was almost impossible to comprehend death as an integral part of life, and to see that the cycle of life and death and life again was what Keats was noting.

Actually, the whole poem is a beautifully evocative description of England at this time of year. Yes – there are even hints of such sights and sounds to be found and experienced in The Smoke.

The weather changed two days ago, with temperatures falling by such noticeable degrees that a scarf was suddenly in order for the mornings.

With the nights having already drawn in, we’ve arrived at the days when the cardi and slippers call.

The cardigan of the food world – the ultimate comfort food – is soup. And this weekend offered the perfect opportunity to get busy creating warming bowls of comfort.

Chopped onions and garlic, softening

Given that La Bouche has Roscoff onions in, it was an obvious leap to opt for the first French onion soup of the season.

You can certainly use other onions (depending on what you can find), but the point is to make sure hat you’re decent. It’s the point of the dish, after all, so you want some quality flavour.

But perhaps most vital of all, this soup needs time: it’s not the business of 20 minutes.

For two people, I took four of the Roscoff onions, peeled and chopped them.

Now Raymond Blanc suggests slicing, but since The Other Half grouches and says he prefers chopped, this is one occasion on which I will ignore the great chef.

I use a Le Creuset shallow casserole dish to cook this – it allows a far better ratio of cooking surface to onion than any other pan I possess and, of course, its heat-retaining qualities work wonders with such a dish.

So, chop your onions, plus some garlic (four cloves for the two of us).

Over a gentle heat, melt a generous amount of butter – and I do mean generous: 50g won’t go amiss.

When the last of the solids have disappeared into a pool of yellow, pop in your onion and garlic and spread it evenly over the base of the pan. And then let everything start to do its magic.

Slowly does it, remember: this is a marathon of love, not a sprint of convenience.

More colours of autumn

It can take a long time to start browning, but don’t be tempted to turn up the temperature beyond what allows the liquid butter to just – and only just! – produce the odd bubble. Quite apart from anything else, you don’t want to burn either the butter or the garlic.

Don’t be tempted to stir it too much either or it won’t brown.

Now if you really want, you can try a bit of a cheat here, although I’m not convinced of its efficacy. A sprinkle of sugar is claimed by some to speed up the caramelisation process. As I said: I’m unconvinced – and it adds a sort of sweetness to the dish that you don’t want. Given the time it needs, this will sweeten up gorgeously all on its own.

Fast forward and the onion has turned golden. Sprinkle a little plain flour over it and stir in gently. Let it cook through for a minute or so, and then start adding some white wine.

To be honest, I don’t have developed enough taste buds to be able to really notice what I use in such a situation, but I stuck with M Blanc’s golden rule and spent less than a fiver on a bottle, the rest of which was destined for further culinary deployment.

Once you’ve got the got the pan deglazed, add a little stock too (chicken or vegetable; fresh or a cube*), then a sprig of thyme and a couple of bay leaves, cover and leave to simmer oh so gently for a good 40 minutes.

And that’s pretty much that. Check the seasoning – if you used a stock cube, you’re unlikely to need to add any further salt, but a grind or three of pepper will hardly go amiss.

French onion soup with gruyere croutons

To serve in the traditional way, you need a ‘crouton’ or two – no, not little cubes, but, to be strictly accurate, slices of toasted baguette.

Dish up the soup, place a crouton on top of each bowl and scatter coarsely grated gruyere cheese on top, before popping it briefly under the grill so that the cheese starts melting all the way off the bread and into the soup.

It goes without saying that there’s nothing wrong with using something like Cheddar if you can’t get gruyere, but the latter does have a nutty taste that matches superbly with the onion in this dish.

Of course, if – like The Other Half – you don’t like cheese, you do without this added treat or have a crouton spread with mustard.

Now sit and wrap yourself in the warm comfort of this wonderful classic.

It’s worth every moment.

* If you use stock cubes, I recommend Kallo’s Just Bouillon. Unlike most other stock cubes, it doesn’t use palm oil in the ingredients, and the production of this oil is doing grave damage to the habitat of orangutans, so it's a good one to avoid.

It's not all bad: how to feel better about Britain

Just some of our amazing fellow citizens

How often do you watch or read the news and feel that it’s only ever bad, and that it leaves you wondering whether you’ve strayed into the Slough of Despond?

And even if you don’t fall into a trap of assuming that the unrelenting drip, drip of crime and corruption and scandal is a mirror of society as a whole, it can still give you a sense of being rather depressed by it all.

Last night’s Pride of Britain awards were, for precisely those reasons, a very good antidote.

Yes, there was a red carpet and yes, there were plenty of celebrities to hand out the awards, but the winners themselves were, for the most part, hardly household names.

Yet each had a story of courage or dedication that had seen them take the stage to receive an award.

There was Margaret Aspinall, the mother of one of the Hillsborough dead, who has never given up campaigning for justice for the 96.

Karin Williams, a lollipop lady from Wales, threw herself in front of an out-of-control car to save a group of children – and remains, for the present, in a wheelchair.

Every Saturday night, 86-year-old Anne Scarfe goes out with a team of volunteers in Plymouth to help young people get home safely after an evening on the tiles.

The members of the RNLI flood rescue team in Devon were honoured for their bravery.

Twins Trevor and Ray Powles, now in their 70s, suffered TB as young men, but then dedicated their lives to becoming doctors, and have made enormous steps forward in the understanding and treatment of breast cancer and leukaemia respectively.

After nine years without a job, Clifford Harding felt that his life was going nowhere, but he developed a way of helping children to learn their times table by using rap.

June Kelly founded and runs a football team in Cheetham Hill, one of the most deprived areas of the country, where she’s helped to keep youngsters off the streets and out of trouble – her team has even been lauded for the politeness of the players.

Sharon Grey was named teacher of the year for turning around a school near Nottingham that was threatened with closure, while 12-year-old Balie Kershaw won for giving CPR as he waited for an ambulance to arrive after his father had suffered a massive heart attack.

An award also went to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager that the Taliban tried to murder because she was campaigning for education for girls. As the possibility has been raised that she might win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Taliban has said that it is committed to trying to kill her again and will be “proud” if it can do so.

And so the stories went on.

It would take a very hardened cynic to have maintained a dry eye throughout – and I happily admit that even I am not that cynical.

So many ordinary (what does that even mean?) people doing remarkable, generous things – or even just overcoming incredible odds. It was a humbling yet uplifting watch.

Good news rarely makes the headlines – audiences seem wedded to sensational and negative stories: or rather, news organisations tend to have decided that that is the case and that that is what they will provide.

And it can warp perceptions. For instance, when did you ever read a report about a social worker who has successfully saved a child from an abusive home?

The answer is that you won’t have: social workers feature in the news when things go wrong, and then there’s a culture in a large section of the news media of vilifying them – often because of a barely-veiled ideological hatred of the public services/state/PC etc.

It’s important to say that it’s not always easy for news media to find good-news stories and give them prominence – I know, having been a duty chief sub editor on a national paper, and having made the sort of decisions that I’m referring to.

In those days, I tried to balance out the usual unpleasant or ‘serious’ news at least a little with, if nothing else, one ‘happy’ picture in an edition. And – I hope it goes without saying – a fact-based, non-hysterical approach to the rest of the news, which can also make a difference.

As Fleet Street Fox rather nicely illustrated in her Mirror column yesterday, the Daily Mail is unlikely to be involved with a Pride of Britain awards scheme any time soon.

But unfortunately, the Mail is believed by many of those who read it: its brand of bile really does inform how many people see this country, even while they somehow continue to think that it is a respectable, honest and truthful organ.

It is none of those things.

I glanced through a copy of the Mail this morning: there was nothing about the Pride of Britain awards. Well, you didn’t really expect there to be, did you?

After all, Paul Dacre and his pack of attack dogs aren’t interested in anything other than serving the whims of their master, the tax exile Lord Rothermere.

And if that means drip-feeding the readership an addictive diet of brutalising, hate-filled paranoia, so be it.

Yet in the last 10 days, the Mail has gone into an overdrive of nastiness, almost as though this will convince some that self-regulation of the industry is working (honest) and should be allowed to continue.

Pride of Britain was a welcome antidote to all the negativity – not least from a publication that really does seem to hate the Britain that we live in today.

On the other hand, if Dacre were to spontaneously combust any time soon – preferably live on TV, facing questions about why he’s such a nasty, hate-sprewing piece of work – it would doubtless make one of the jolliest stories anyone has read for years.

It's all in the game

Autumnal Hackney sunset

The weather has been so all over the place for the second year running that, according to some reports, English apples are only now appearing on supermarket shelves – a full three weeks later than normal.

But while the temperature may yet be clinging to levels that are unusual for October – and even producing an unwelcome mugginess – the days have shortened and, in London at any rate, a certain greyness has been the dominant theme of the last fortnight.

In the carpark at the back of Voluptuous Villas, the slender silver birches are yellowing fast, while leaves are starting to fall steadily.

That it is autumn then, can no longer be in doubt.

If apples and pears are now arriving – actually, I’ll let you into a little secret: English apples have been available on Broadway Market on a Saturday since early September – and if parsnips are but a frost away from adding their sweetness to our plates, then another thing is sure: the game season is upon us.

Back in June, when all anyone cared about was summer, given that spring had gone missing in inaction, a new book landed on my doormat.

Bruno Loubet’s Mange Tout offered a selection of recipes that perfectly fitted the long days and the rising temperatures.

As I mentioned here, the confited salmon with asparagus and green gazpacho is a delight and will be done again when the English asparagus pops its head above the soil next year.

But amid all the excitement over summer food, an autumn dish stood out for me from that early browsing: pigeon with cauliflower done two ways, and a blackberry sauce.

One of the delights with Bruno’s cooking is that, even when you haven’t heard of a dish or a food combination before, they always sound so completely natural.

It’s classic and modern all at once.

And so I’ve been waiting to try this one since we returned from France.

The first problem, however, was that Andy and Wild Game Co have disappeared from Broadway Market.

Not, I should say, of his own volition, but with various summer festivals offering him better seasonal business opportunities, it seems that the market managers said that he couldn’t take a break and then return in the autumn.

All of which is slightly annoying – not least since much game is seasonal. The pheasant season, for instance, only opened on 1 October.

Thankfully, Andy has been incredibly helpful, and we organised a way to get me a couple of bags of game. Most has gone in the freezer, although it won’t be staying there very long.

In many ways, last year was the breakthrough one when I finally learned how to cook some game decently, and I have no desire for that to be halted any time soon.

Anyway, the first dish was venison fillet, seared and served with roast veggies and some of the Balsamico drizzle that I swear by both for taste and making a dish look a bit more artful.

The veg in question were swede, carrot and sweet potato, roasted for 35-40 minutes at 200˚C (fan) with a few (drained and dried) tinned spuds thrown in late; all tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper and dried thyme – a wonderfully earthy background to the meat.

The second dish was pigeon.

Now Andy supplies me with pigeon breast – to be honest, my butchery skills are not that good that I’d particularly like to attack a bird myself: the breasts are small enough that you don’t want to risk losing any.

However, Bruno’s recipe calls for whole birds, the breasts of which are cut off, while the carcass is used to make a sauce.

Bruno also starts his sauce with a shallot and a parsnip, and since we haven’t yet had the first frost, I am avoiding parsnips until they’re really worth eating.

So I didn’t follow the instructions to the letter, in other words, but started with a mirepoix lite of shallot instead of onion, carrot and celery.

You soften those gently - the first opportunity to do this in one of the Le Creuset saucepans, and what a difference that makes – and then add booze.

Bruno's chicken – before cooking

Now Bruno recommends port and brandy. Again, you can improvise a little – a small bottle of red wine isn’t going to cost as much as port and it won’t insult the final dish. And a miniature of brandy is more than enough.

Reduce, reduce, reduce – and then add stock and reduce again. It’s pretty classic sauce stuff. Strain and add the blackberries to cook briefly before serving.

In the meantime, you bring some milk to a simmer, letting it infuse with a few caraway seeds, before cooking cauliflower florets until tender, then draining and blitzing. Add a drop or two of the milk if you need to for a smooth purée. This has the advantage that it can be made early and then warmed gently before serving.

Mash up some juniper berries with salt and pepper, coat the pigeon breasts and leave them to absorb the flavours. The smell of doing all of this, incidentally, is wonderful.

Near the time, you reheat the purée, then slice the remaining florets as thinly as you can and dress.

Again, improvisation, since I didn’t have walnut oil. I used olive oil and, instead of red wine vinegar, some of my thicker raspberry vinegar, plus salt and red pepper.

To cook the pigeon is simple and a brief matter: just a couple of minutes a side in a hot pan with a drop of olive oil.

Now I have to point out, at this stage, that the picture in the book cannot be the real dish: the raw cauli, once dressed, is NOT going to appear as immaculately white. Hey ho – food porn is as generous with reality as the other sort.

But in taste terms there is nothing false.

This dish packs a wonderful punch. It is a superb combination of flavours and textures and, even if I couldn’t manage quite the studied informality of presentation as that photo suggested, it doesn’t look bad either.

Next up was Bruno’s roast chicken with a parsley, garlic butter stuffing.

Not a stuffing in the usual way, but one that is gently pushed between skin and flesh, meaning that the bird, in effect, self bastes. That was about as far as I stuck with that recipe, but again, wonderful tastes and aromas.

It’s a recipe that can also be used for a guinea fowl, apparently.

Which point keeps the game theme going.

It'’s not easy if you don’t have a specialist supplier or a local butcher that does it, but game is a wonderful meat. Well, lots of wonderful meats, to be rather more accurate.

If you’re worried about fat, then game is lean – and still absolutely bursting with flavour.

Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, we tried kangaroo for the first time: bought from the Exotic Meat Company (Gamston Wood Ostrich Farm) at Borough Market a few months ago, it was the result of a cull in Australia and had been frozen at source.

It was fillet and, as suggested above, as lean as anything. All I did was to bring it to room temperature and dry it off, and then sear it in a little olive oil, and serve with pretty standard veg on the side. Game really can be so easy and so quick.

And when flavour is so good and so strong, you don’t have to do a lot with it. It becomes a brilliant midweek meal.

There’s a moral to all this.

If you can, get hold of game in season and learn to cook and enjoy it. It’s plentiful on these islands, and there’s also plenty of variety.

And in spite of the UK’s history of deforestation and enclosure by the ruling elite – or maybe even also because of it – let’s not get caught up in a belief that game is only for them and not us.

As it is in France and many other places game should be for all of us. It’s great food – but not ‘posh’ food.

And before I forget to suggest it – get Bruno’s book.

The Mail, the Nazis and the poisoning of British life

Lord Rothermere and, err, some Austrian bloke

It comes to something when Alastair Campbell, former spindoctor to Tony Blair, finds himself being cheered by swathes of the population that normally wouldn’t give him the time of day.

But that was precisely what happened last night, when Campbell appeared on BBC’s Newsnight programme to discuss the Daily Mail’s latest attempts to smear Labour Party leader Ed Miliband.

To put it colloquially, Campbell tore Mail deputy editor Jon Steafel a new one.

Steafel had been sent along instead of editor Paul Dacre to face down accusations that the paper had gone well over the top.

In case you’ve missed the row, the Mail decided that the best way to attack Miliband E was to attack his deceased father, Ralph, and thereby suggest that Ralph’s “evil legacy” was influencing Ed.

So dangerous is Ed, it now seems, that this sort of toxic tactic was the only answer.

Ralph Miliband was a well-known academic and Marxist. Although in terms of the latter, he was no supporter of the Soviet regime and was never a member of any Communist party.

A refugee from Nazism, when he was 17, he wrote in his diary (to paraphrase) that Britain was very nationalistic and a defeat at some point might make people see some reality.

This was the same individual who then went and joined the Navy to do his bit in WWII.

But this comment has been taken, by the Mail, as evidence that Ralph Miliband “hated” Britain. And of course the gist is simple: if the father hated Britain and was such a dodgy political sort, well, what does that say about the son ... nod, nod, wink, wink.

It seems to boil down to this: if you don’t like monarchy, the church and bicameral legislature, then you obviously hate the entire country.

Because those things are the very essence of Britain; the things that define Britain. Obviously.

When you see it like this, the wonder is that it has blown into the full-scale row that it has.

But Ed dared to object to the article last weekend. He dared to object to the Mail setting out to smear a man who was dead and couldn’t answer back – this is the same Mail, after all, that condemned anyone who didn’t do deep grief at the passing, earlier this year, of St Margaret of Grantham.

Ed was particularly peeved by the claim that his father “hated” Britain.

He was given a right of reply in yesterday’s paper – which is more than most people get when they’ve been shafted by Dacre and his minions.

But as an indication that Dacre might really be losing the plot, the paper published an edited version of the original article alongside Ed’s piece, together with an editorial proclaiming that it was standing by the original comments.

There’s more in today’s paper, including a piece about Soviet atrocities as an illustration of what Ralph Miliband believed in. Which just sort of misses the fact, mentioned above, that he was not pro-Soviet and did not support such things as what happened in Czechoslovakia, as it was then.

And so, on last night’s Newsnight programme, Steafel was sent on to defend the paper’s actions. Which he singularly failed to be able to do, merely stalling, while Campbell made himself an unlikely hero by, amongst other things, describing Dacre as a “poison in our national life”, and adding that the Mail was “The worst of British values posing as the best.”

Hilariously, Steafel tried to claim that mentions of the Mail’s own record in the 1930s was irrelevant – but not the diary entry of a teenager from pretty much the same period. Talk about making it up, etc.

Well, I’m sorry, Steafel, but your masters set the terms of this matter.

So for clarity, the Mail supported Hitler, the Nazis and our own Blackshirts.

Lord Rothermere, the then owner and great grandfather of the current owner, penned a piece that was headlined: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, plus congratulatory and painfully crawling telegrams to old Adolph, while he himself was lauded by Goebbels in 1937, in the following terms:

“Very small party for lunch. Rothermere pays me great compliments. Enquiries in detail about German press. Strongly anti-Jewish ... Rothermere writes and good and useful articles in favour of an Anglo-Herman alliance. He is a strong supporter of the Führer”. (p196 Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II by David Faber).

Now who is it that has left an “evil legacy”?

Reaction has not seen a split upon obvious tribal political lines. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have both, if not condemning the Mail, supported Miliband E’s decision to challenge it.

Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith has come out strongly against the paper. The Mail's own website saw damning comments from many readers.

On the other hand, secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, whose wife just happens to write a column for the Mail, called it “robust”.

There’s nothing wrong with “robust”, but this ain’t “robust” – it’s a straightforward attempt at character assassination and smearing.

What's good for the goose ...

If only we did have a “robust” news media, but by and large, we don’t.

Miliband E has, of course, been supportive of independent regulation of the press, which Dacre is completely opposed to, regularly misrepresenting any such plans as ‘state regulation’, which nobody has proposed.

But then, Dacre is not one to let facts get in the way of what he wants.

He’s renowned as a bully. His editorial meetings are known as ‘the vagina monologues’ because of the language he uses – and as someone who’s sat in an awful lot of editorial meetings themselves, let me assure you that you don’t need to be an expert in ‘double-cunting’, as Dacre apparently is, in order to produce decent journalism.

An adulterer himself, he edits a publication that is obsessed with sex and with exposing people’s private lives, even when there is no legitimate public interest argument for doing so.

He presides editorially over an organisation that considers it acceptable to buy paparazzi pictures of an eight-year-old child and label her a “leggy beauty”, along with describing other underage girls creepily as “all grown up”. 

How very British.

The current Rothermere shows his love for Britain by registering his company in Bermuda, claiming that he and his wife live in France – and paying no tax in the UK on all the money he makes from the lies and the sordid attempts to titillate and shock the readership.

The problem with all this is simple: the Mail has been allowed to get away with its bullying, nasty approach for years, to the extent that it has far too much political influence and clout for something that should be merely considered a comic.

There are people who claim that they read it but don’t believe it. There are, however, plenty who read it and allow it to inform their own opinions – no matter how generous the paper’s editorial team is with a definition of ‘the truth’.

You do not have to be uncritical about a country to love it – on that basis, the Mail is so hate-filled that it must, by its own definition, hate Britain.

But in a democracy – a genuine one, at any rate – you should be able to comprehend that people can have different ideas about what a country should be like, but that that does not mean that only some of them love the said country.

And goodness – haven’t there been enough illustrations, throughout history and across the world, of unquestioning patriotism causing untold suffering, for anyone to seriously pretend that they have the monopoly on what is ‘right’ when it comes to loving one’s country?

Perhaps Dacre merely confuses country and cunt?

Increasingly, I wonder whether he and Rothermere actually do care about anything other than profit and the money in their own bank accounts.

They have helped to bring public discourse and debate in the UK to the parlous level it currently inhabits, yet seem determined to carry on along the same route. Dacre has, indeed, just been given a new contract, in spite of rumours that he might retire next month, when he hits 65.

For clarity, I don’t want the Mail banned or prohibited. I’d simply like it – and the rest of the media – to show some journalistic scruples – a journalism realised that the country as a whole would be better off with a “robust” media that questioned and chased, but without mixing editorial and reporting, and with a belief that facts are actually a good thing.

Equally, I have no desire whatsoever to outlaw offence – far from it. There should never be any right to not be offended.

For further clarity, I’m not even suggesting that the Mail should not have published the original article, but that what it has done shows what it is; shows up its own double standards and shows how desperate it is to push its own agenda – and when it cannot do the latter by fair means, it will use the dirtiest that it can.

And if saying that, and believing that there are things that could be done that would make this country a better place to live for more of its population means that I’m a hater, well thank god I’m on this side of that fence.

In the meantime, polling conducted between 30 September and yesterday, on behalf of the Sun [pdf], shows that Ed’s ratings have increased.

That, of course, is partly in response to a raft of policies, announced at the Labour Party conference less than a fortnight ago, that have had some right-wingers frothing at the mouth.

But one could be forgiven for thinking that the idea of a price freeze on domestic energy bills is a popular one with those polled – and also that this row has done nothing to diminish Ed Miliband in the eyes of the public.

So for all the reasons that the Mail hates Miliband E, from that touted energy policy to Leveson, the poisonous Dacre decided to launch an astonishing attack – not just on Ed, but on a man who has been dead from some years: a man who did serve his country.

Unlike Dacre’s own father, who apparently managed to spend the war as a showbiz correspondent for the Express.

And it’s difficult to imagine that Dacre’s actions in the last few days have done a single thing to advance the cause of those who wish for no regulation of the media whatsoever – unless they’re the ones doing the ‘regulating’.

Perhaps he and Rothermere really have finally lost the plot completely.

Further reading

Telegraph obituary of Ralph Miliband, from 1994.

It's my body – not yours

London protest against harassment at clinics

It’s difficult – if not downright impossible – to imagine that anyone could consider abortion to be ‘nice’.

But while many countries now have legal abortion, there are still countries that do not – and plenty of campaigners that would like to stop for former having legal abortion too.

From 25 September, in response to the campaign 40 Days for Life, a counter campaign, in support of reproductive rights, was launched: 40 Days for Choice.

40 Days for Life is not a new group, and it uses US-style tactics, picketing clinics where abortions are carried out or at least discussed: in other words, harassing those entering or leaving.

The campaign states quite clearly that it wishes to see “an end to abortion”.

Not just a reduction in times within which an abortion can legally be carried out, but an end to all abortions.

Now just think what that actually means.

It means that, even if a woman is likely to die unless she has an abortion ... well, she’ll just have to get on with it and die, won’t she: preferably as quietly as possible. Because, the message goes, the ‘unborn child’ is more important than her.

In Nicaragua, where an incoming government sucked up to the Catholic Church by introducing precisely such a ban, women have died and are dying because of it.

If there is a hell, then Daniel Ortega deserves to go there for this one move – and all to get himself off the hook over accusations of abusing his own daughter.

Which also says something about the church’s attitude to the rights of children once they’ve actually popped out, although we probably already knew that.

Indeed, to stay with Nicragaua, there have been at least two cases of a young girls being made pregnant as a result of rape.

The Catholic Church has squealed at the prospect of them having an abortion, threatening excommunication – but not for the rapist.

But setting that aside, such an aim works, philosophically, on the premise that life begins at the moment of conception. And that, if you’re religiously minded, is when the soul is miraculously ‘born’ too.

However, just one of the problems with this approach is that of spontaneous or natural abortion.

If one describes any fertilised human egg as a ‘unborn child’ (ie a human person), then there’s a lot of ‘children’ who ‘die’ when the body naturally or spontaneously aborts.

Scientific research suggests that less than 50% of all fertilised eggs will even be successfully implanted into a woman’s womb causing pregnancy to continue.

There is then a 25-50% chance of aborting before the woman even realises that she is pregnant. If, however, she makes it to a month, then the odds go up to 75% chance of carrying to term.

So if we accept the belief that life begins at conception, then nature herself is a mass murderer. Or, more pertinently, God, the creator of everything, is a mass murderer.

Mind, fundamentalists and their supporters in the US are trying hard to tackle this natural deviation from the plan that God himself obviously got somewhat wrong by bringing in laws to prosecute women who miscarry, if it is decided that they did something that may have brought that miscarriage on.

So, watch out with that glass of wine with your dinner – you might be pregnant and if you miscarry, you might then be responsible for murder.

In case you’re wondering whether this campaign really has a religious link, the campaign blog hopes “That all the campaigns across the UK will be blessed with God’s grace”, while the Twitter account says that the 40 days will be accompanied by “peaceful prayer”.

So what do they do? They harass people who are probably in a fairly conflicted and vulnerable state to start with.

In the meantime, we have a global population that is rising to levels that present problems when it comes to sustainability.

No – I’m not suggesting that abortion is the key, but pointing out that we’re hardly short of new human life as a result of abortion.

It’s a popular approach for anti-abortionists to claim that abortion is being used as a contraception, yet one that is not supported by research among those who seek a termination.

Of course part of the religious answer is that one should not have sex unless one is, at the least, prepared to get pregnant and, for many, unless one is intending to procreate.

Damn that God geezer again: makes sex so damnably pleasurable and then has his squaddies wandering around telling people not to do it because it’s sinful.

Worse still, if you’re a Catholic, then even a relieving wank is out of the question because that’s a mortal sin. Far better just to increase the global population. Or be celibate. Like priests.

Not only do anti-abortionists play to a sentimental view of when ‘life’ begins and what it means, they also like to pretend that they are ‘pro-life’. As opposed to anyone else.

It gets particularly amusing in the US, where many of the same ‘pro-lifers’ turn distinctly anti-life if there’s the chance of a nice execution going.

Simply, it is far better to describe them as being anti-abortion or even anti-choice.

Those who are pro-choice believe that a woman has the right to choose – whether that be to have an abortion or not.

There is something rather disturbing about a group of people wanting to control the sex life and body of complete strangers.

Not only wanting to, but believing that they have the right to.

In the US again, it’s doubly creepy – and hypocritical – since many of the same people who oppose abortion also like to rant and rave about keeping the state out of as much as possible.

Expect women’s reproductive systems. Obviously.

The idea that a foetus – a life that is not realised – should take precedence over a realised, developed life, even if that kills the latter, is one that can only come about, ultimately, through a hatred of women: in most cases, a hatred either borne of religious belief or lent some form of legitimacy by it.

A belief that women are to blame for sin, for The Fall.

It also comes with a view that sex, outside of heterosexual, monogamous marriage, is wrong, and that female sexuality in particular is dangerous and needs to be controlled.

A few other religions have similar ideas too.

It's quite remarkable just how dangerous to civilisation my cunt appears to be.

It is difficult to imagine any other circumstance in which people seem to imagine that they have a right to control another human being’s body – apart from the question of the right to die, where religion also gets involved, and where those who otherwise want the state out of private lives suddenly want it to defend what they believe to be God’s will.

People have every right to believe that abortion is wrong. They have every right to campaign openly and honestly.

They do not have the right to bully and harass in an underhand effort to get their way.

It would be nice if anti-abortion campaigners would start a political party and stand for election, just to see how popular their views are. But they won’t. For obvious reasons.

As a placard at one protest against 40 Days For Life put it: 'Keep your rosaries out of my ovaries'.

• You can keep up to date with the campaign at the following:

@40DaysofChoice

40daysforchoice.tumblr.com