Rolling Your I's

I'm busy trying to get some ideas for the Last Sunday before Blingtide sermon. Which means that, as normal in these circumstances, i 've been racing around the 'net trying to find notable ideas to steal. And I was interested to read Biblical Preaching's take on dropping names during sermons.

And I think that's so right, as I was saying to my friend Dicky Dawkins the other day. It's supposed to be our secret, but because there's only the four or five of you reading out there I'm sure it's not going to leak out.

It was during my year studying Influenza virus glycoproteins in the Zoology department at Oxford. I believe it was the start-of-year welcome to new members of the department (a concept, let me tell you, that the Chemists could have copied). And Dicky - as he lets me call him - was so down in the dumps. And I said to him - look, Professor (as I called him then)  - it's a common problem. You write a seminal work like The Blind Watchmaker, you've the world at your feet - and then you realise that you have nowhere to go. And everyone looks to you for answers and - let's face it - you"re not God.

And do you know, I led him to faith? Of course for contractual reasons he's spent the last twenty or so years writing atheist books but if you can find your way through the stereotypes, name-dropping and lazy straw people (slack-jawed and otherwise) you will realise that, without his publishers noticing, he's actually being cleverly ironic - in much the same way that Ricky Gervais pretends he's a thoughtless oaf. But these days Dicky is ducking out of debates rather than admitting that his life has been a clever - if lucrative - joke.

But as I got back to college that night in 1986, I met a shiny-faced member of the Tennis Club in the Porter's Lodge, wearing a Dickie Bow, and looking glumly at his tennis racquet. A string had broken during the match against Rubric that afternoon, and his valet had been unable to repair it as he had been called unexpectedly away to look after an auntie who had contracted TB. Why, asked young Cameron, did such unfortunate things always happen to him? It would be past midnight before Jeeves was back to fix the racquet now, and how would it be any use for hitting eggs into the fans at that night's Bullingdon Club event?

"Dave," I told him, "I feel for you. We're all in this together."

And do you know, my using the shortened version of his name, and the expression I'd just used - which, being posh, he'd never heard before - sent him away with new purpose. He went off to the OUCA meeting that night instead of the Bullers.

But, as I said to the Dalai Lama last week, I'd never drop names. You're just trying to use other people's fame to give yourself cheaap kudos - or building yourself up with unlikely anecdotes in which you're the hero.  And who wants to do that kind of thing?