A THING RABBIT KNOWS

If you enjoy A.A. Milne's "Winnie The Pooh" and "The House At Pooh Corner" (not the cartoon versions) as much as I do, you may remember the sad chapter near the end of the second book where Christopher Robin is learning his alphabet and 'twy stimes' table, and is obviously going off to school.

Eeyore, the gloomy donkey, thinks he will learn the alpahbet too, and makes an "A" out of sticks, and asks Rabbit, the perennial busybody, what it is.

Rabbit replies, "An A, but not a very good one."

Poor Eeyore, cut to the quick, jumps on the sticks, saying "A, a thing Rabbit knows?"

Ever felt like that? I have.

It is very unpleasant (and hard to accept) when someone I don't like, who is a bit of a know-all, gets it right, and in a smarty-pants kind of way.

"How can I hear what you say, when what you are is deafening me?" as an African is said to have asked a European missionary.

We must always be careful - no, I must - to be sure that when we reject an idea, we are not rejecting it simply out of dislike or contempt for, or a grievance against, the author of that idea.

For example:

I don't like Richard Dawkins's face. I don't like clever-head atheists. If he told me the time I would want a second opinion: not reasonable.

Likewise Tony Blair: when he was received into the Catholic Church, I was annoyed. When he proved to be a dissenting Catholic, I was, shamefully, just a little gruntled.

The conflict between the Greek leaders Aristides, nicknamed 'The Just" and Themistocles ended in the ostracism of Aristides, at a date variously given between 485 BC and 482 BC. It is said that an illiterate voter, who did not know Aristides, came up to him, and giving him his voting sherd, desired him to write upon it the name of Aristides. The latter asked if Aristides had wronged him.

"No," was the reply, "and I do not even know him, but it irritates me to hear him everywhere called the just."

I am sure I would have liked Aristides and not wished for his ostracism, but even so, that illiterate was, I am ashamed to say, "mon semblable, mon frere".