Doubt
12 January

I have been trained to doubt.

From an early age, my intellectual training has been to doubt and to ask questions, not to take things for granted, not to go along with the status quo.

More recently, as a Quaker, I have chosen to follow a spiritual path which does not found itself upon a bedrock of certainty. There is no creed within Quakerism; the call is to find what is good within you on a daily basis.

Oliver Cromwell's plea to his opponents ("I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ, consider it possible ye may be wrong") can just as easily be directed inwards as well as outwards.

So, on the Sunday before this week's work, I suddenly found myself consumed with doubt concerning a judgement call which I had made late last year and which now required some justification. I was quite happy to do that. I've written it up and I'm happy that I did the best that I could on the day. Suddenly, late in the evening, I began to consider it possible that I was wrong.

The thought preyed on me in the night. I did what I haven't normally done in the past. I got up. I didn't lie in bed fretting. I got up and had a cup of tea. I reminded myself that I couldn't do anything about it until Tuesday but that I could email Jill in the morning to alert her to my doubts.

And that I did. I got back into bed and slept. Then, in the morning, I got up and emailed Jill and had a useful rest of the day.

Tuesday came and everything slotted into place. Jill seemed much less concerned than I was. She's written a number of these reports herself. And she was pragmatic. The worst that could happen was that we would agree to change our first decision.

All in all I was quite right not to fall prey to doubt and to waste a good night's sleep.

Come Thursday night, Ross and I went out to the Plaza cinema to see Pan's Labyrinth. It is an exceedingly odd film. It is set in Spain in 1944. The Civil War in that country is over but the country is still divided and there are partisans in the hills who continue the struggle in a sporadic fashion. Elsewhere, fascism is in retreat as the second great European cataclysm comes to a bloody end. It is a grey, grim and occasionally violent time.

In amongst all of this, there is a young girl. And her way of coping with and understanding the adult mayhem around her is to conjure up a magic, alternative reality. And it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the existence of the alternative as the film progresses. The alternative is as bright and gaudy and lavish as the everyday reality is grey and grim and hopeless. Only pain and violence inhabit both spheres.

I'm not going to say more than that because it is really a film to experience at first hand rather than through the description of someone else. I think that it was an excellent, if quirky, start to the new cinematic year.