I found the most incredible story, about a journalist who befriends a murderer after the murderer goes on the run with his name. Now on death row, the pair have exchanged letters for over a decade.

It's a fascinating read, though it made me feel pretty bad about the relish with which I'd been listening to "Murder Ballads" yesterday. One of the things they always highlight about serial killers is how ordinary they seemed - which, as an ordinary person, worries me a lot. Jailbirds get hundreds of fan letters, in a manner I find pretty creepy. I have considered becoming a prisoner penpal, mostly because it must be inconcievably nasty to be stuck in jail and feeling guilty, or worse, not feeling guilty but knowing you should. The isolation must be total. Now while killing someone violates my prime directive - "if no one is hurt, then I don't see the problem with it", my secondary directive probably boils down to "everyone is sort-of right". Let me try and explain what I mean. Believing is a case of an individual weighing up the evidence and making a judgement. Once someone has done that and the proof has convinced them, they go on to live their life as if their belief were reality. As far as I'm concerned, if it's as good as true to another human being, then on some level it must be true. Because in their percepetions, it is true. So why shouldn't it be?

Making sense? A lot of people disagree with me about this level of subjectivity - "but surely some things are absolutely right or wrong?" Maybe. I don't know - we're talking about my beliefs here after all. But this is very important to me, because it seems to be the root of understanding other people - the attempt to see from their perspective fully. To take this to its furthest logical conclusion, I still believe in Father Christmas despite strong evidence to the contrary. I do this because I like the idea and choose to believe, and am fully capable of convincing myself without any proof at all.

Knowledge can't be absolute. For thousands of years, people were perfectly content with "knowing" that Poseidon ruled the waves and that the sun went around the Earth; that leeches or exorcism could cure what Calpol cures today; that lonely women were witches, and that "popular" women were shameful, and that we could pick and choose "lesser" races as slaves". We've thought better of all of that since. Our current age must be similarly packed with horrors which men of the future will look back at and wince. The moment you commit to something being "right", you are barring a whole lot of understanding. Remember Charles Fort?

"skeptical of scientific explanations, observing how scientists argued accoring to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence, and that inconvenient data was ignored, suppresed, discredited or explained away".

I believe and disbelieve, in more or less equal measure, most religions, most scientists, most spiritual or ethical viewpoints. Intellectually at least, if not in practice. I think you've got to have a heart of stone to not convert (if only for a moment) in the last verse of "In the Bleak Midwinter", but I'd say the same about an excruciatingly beautiful Koran, or a splended natural phenomenon, or a physicist showing me Mercury through a telescope. They all reveal the wonder of something, and yet I think it's pretentious to claim that any one system can explain it all fully. That's sheer human egotism. It's all far too big and diverse. I also believe Gallifrey is a real planet, and I take off my hat when I pass the Marquis of Granby in Cambridge Circus for a man who never existed.

There are some I don't. But I think it's important to try, if only as a tourist, to see what other people see in it. Now on the whole, murder is not OK (except in war...or self defence...or to punish criminals...or because the patient is in great pain...or in revenge...or because he's the baddie and that's how a Bond has to end...or in a thousand other exceptions man has found across the years. Add some of your own.) Most normal people will never consider it, even more never do it - because it's nasty, sinful, againtst the law e.t.c. A thousand different reasons because of which people, on the whole, don't go around killing. And then one or two reasons which impell one or two people who do. Something, somewhere happened to "them" which never happened to "us". Maybe it was something they saw as a kid, something someone did, or maybe their brains were just put together "wrongly", but for some strange reason we're safe, and they're not. So I imagine being a murderer must be something like being a Colin Baker fan - very lonely, because you understand something which everyone else disagrees with. And one of the things that struck me in that article was the way the fella couldn't feel remorse for killing his entire family, even though he knew he should be.

You can see why that would strike me as a scary thought.

On a happier note, I will leave you with some Charles Fort quotes. He was a bit of a nut, but when it comes down to it, he does have some very pithy statements which explain far better (or at least, quicker) what I was trying to say:

"Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful. "

"My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike to ever mention fraud. Accept anything. Then explain it your way."

"There will be data."

"The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely."

"The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open."

"Witchcraft always has a hard time, until it becomes established and changes its name (i.e. to science)"

"I conceive of nothing, in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while"

"I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. "