Believe or die

WHEN will politicians stop referring to Ukip's success as extraordinary? It was not so much extraordinary as inevitable. Push people too far in the wrong direction and one day they will push you back. A politician who doesn't get that doesn't understand anything about politics, or people.

WHEN young men volunteer for war, their families do not always see them as heroes. A court heard how, when Mashudur Choudhury told his wife he wanted to join the civil war in Syria, she texted him: "Go die in battle. Go die. I really mean it, just go." I was reminded of another war and an old soldier I once interviewed. Jim Jones lied about his age to join the army in 1940 when he was just 16. The memory of his mother's reaction stayed with him for the next 70 years. She said: "If he wants to get his bloody head blown off, let him." Jim Jones won the Military Medal in Burma and came home a hero. Mashudur Choudhury is probably going to jail. Fortunes of war.

A BAPTIST church in Norfolk has agreed to remove a poster which threatened unbelievers with hellfire after police received a single complaint from a 20-year-old. The police recorded the poster as a "hate incident." The poster in question reads: "If you think there is no God you'd better be right!" with images of flames underneath. I'm not sure whether that constitutes hate but we live in an age where people are encouraged to take deep offence at almost anything. If this poster sets a precedent, what hope for those colourful bible-thumping zealots in sandwich-boards telling us the end is nigh and that we must repent or go to hell? Are they to be ordered off the streets? Is the right to free expression now trumped by the right of a 20-year-old boy not to take offence? Sadly, that seems to be the mindset of modern police and their political masters. Those of us who remember an England where opinions were frankly and robustly exchanged can only hold our peace and hope we, like the pastor, do not get the knock on the door.

IF nothing else, the hellfire poster was a reminder that organised religion is such a load of unconvincing tosh that, throughout history, "belief" has been enforced with the threat of torture, either in this world or the next, or both. Unbelievers in Christian societies were burned at the stake; apostates in Muslim societies were (and in some places, still are) stoned to death. It seems very odd that we are invited to worship a God who endows us with the ability to doubt and then punishes us when we do. Even so, the right of people to express beliefs we fundamentally disagree with is at the heart of liberty and democracy. Let us save the hellfire posters. The campaign starts here.

WISH me luck. I'm off on the annual sailing rally I organise, a 48-hour celebration of sleep deprivation and getting wet, coupled with the fetid delights of sleeping in a dank tent and losing one's contact lenses. As always, the weather forecast is horrible. While we all take pride in being a maritime nation, never forget that one reason the empire-building English took to the seas was to get away from this damn climate.

ON April 30 the farm track to Chateau Rhodes was resurfaced. It was scalped with a mechanical scraper, drenched in weedkiller, buried under three inches of lava-hot asphalt and rolled to a mirror-hard finish by a brace of vibro-rollers. Yesterday, 27 days later, the first thistle pushed its head through.