The Rev Dr Michael Banner

Good morning.
A German holiday maker has successfully sued his tour operator alleging that he had spent 20 minutes every morning trying, without success, to find sun loungers by the pool. He was on the case at 6 a.m. but the loungers were already covered in towels, though they often remained unoccupied through the day whilst he and his family lay on the ground. The Court awarded him damages. Another tourist commenting on this story gleefully recalls an alternative solution to the problem: 'it soon stopped when some lads were going down in the middle of the night and throwing all the towels into the pool.' But our more law abiding litigant hopes that the fear of legal action will spur tour operators and hotels to devise fair and rational allocation systems for these highly contested spaces.

As far as I know, Thomas Hobbes never took a package holiday, but having lived through the turmoil of the English civil war and its aftermath, he would not have been surprised by stories of so called 'sunbed wars': 'during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe' so he tells us in his great work Leviathan, 'they are in that condition called war'. Hobbes' father was a vicar, and his relationship to Christianity is complicated, as is perhaps not uncommon in such circumstances. But Hobbes' views are not so different from Augustine's, who was in the habit of noting that just as divine history begins with the story of Cain killing Abel, so world history begins with the story of Romulus killing Remus. For Augustine, it is 'every man against every man' as Hobbes puts it, and not just poolside.

I know nothing about the personal beliefs of our German litigant, but I think he is a bit of a hero for spurning two obvious but unhelpful responses to this gloomy diagnosis of the human condition. One is to take the law into your own hands - throwing the towels in the pool - which could end rather badly of course. The other is just to grumble - and who doesn't enjoy a good grumble?

Of all the things in the world which are unfairly and irrationally distributed, sun loungers are by no means the most significant. Houses lie empty, while children sleep on the streets. Food goes to waste while there is hunger. Medicines expire on shelves, and diseases go untreated. Christians have never needed to be told that humans can be deeply selfish, but everywhere the faith is truly alive there have been dreamers and prophets, from St Francis to Martin Luther King, who have contended that the world doesn't have to be determined by our flawed natures, even if we need to reckon with their existence and character. Who knows whether the sunbed wars will come to an end, but Mr Eggert - let's give him his name and due credit – by pushing the tour operators and hotels into action has given us hope for bloodless revolutions.