Email to Michael Palin

[Tony Buck]

Michael

A friend told me that you'd said you'd like a pint with St Paul to find out how he came up with his successful religious formula, how he wangled a suitable message.

This is to misunderstand St Paul - sceptics may call him crazy, but he certainly wasn't a cynic or Machiavel.

St Paul was a man possessed by a vision; perfectly sane people see visions, be these natural or supernatural.

Paul's vision led him to repeated danger and hardship, to flogging and imprisonment at the Romans' hands and - last but not least - to the premature death of a martyr (by decapitation, as it turned out).

Such people change the world, though they aren't success stories in the conventional sense.

You yourself are a fervent believer in the Globetrotter or Travel religion. It has both merits and demerits, but a fatal lack of both intellectual and spiritual content.