Heaven's above!

Christ, of course, preached love for one’s fellow man. Ever since, paedophiles (or as they are sometimes known, Catholic priests) and homosexualists (their Anglican brothers) have been using the fact that the apostles were all blokes in order to stop women entering the priesthood.

Priests love shouting the odds about stopping women becoming priests or bishops or cardinals or popes or whatever because as long as the focus is on stopping women being priests, nobody’s talking about stopping bummers becoming priests.

Priests, one suspects, think that the role of women in the church is to dust, make tea and arrange flowers, rather than become a bishop and then banishing them from their comfortable twee country parish to some challenging inner city hell hole where they think that pastoral care is something that’s done with dairy products. The sort of modernising that today’s clergy would agree with is replacing the collection plate with a chip and pin machine, or better still direct debit because you wouldn’t even need to attend church to contribute. Easy payment tieth scheme; a tenner a week or damnation.

The Anglican church seems to be in a bit of a state about consecrating women as bishops (and yankee bummers in any capacity whatever). Not quite sure why, surely a bishop is just a priest but a bit more senior? So it seems like women will have a bit of trouble breaking the stained glass ceiling. Lots of the dissenting parishes appear to be African, where they take their religion rather seriously. That being the case, one has to ask, have they got the right church?

The Church of England (the head of which is, of course, a woman) is the default option for those who can’t be arsed to think enough about faith to decide whether they have any or not, those of us who go to church, well, never, but are quite happy to pray in moments of crisis. I, for instance, have made numerous deals with God, promising to be a better person if he graciously allows me to live through the hangover prompting my road to Demascus moment. I’m looking at the spire of my village church now and it gives me tremendous comfort to know that it is there. I never go, but it looks jolly pretty and the bells are appealing.

Much, much better a spire than a minaret. I’m always somewhat nervous of allowing priests to build what are essentially look-out posts. The last thing one would want would be to be explaining to one’s priest that you could not make last week’s service because you were ill, only to be confronted with a snapshot taken by a long-lensed camera of you relaxing in your back garden in the sunshine. The fact you are having your cock sucked by your neighbour’s daughter is mere detail, the sin is not turning up for church.

African Anglicans also seem to have something of a downer on ulists. This has always been something of a mystery to me although I suppose the concern in many of the poorer parts of the world that rely heavily on goat-herding for a living is that if the goat boys are frantically bumming each other behind a thicket, it’s easier for a lion to make off with the goats. How many farmers, one wonders, have pitched up for a surprise inspection only to see a couple of goatboys hastily pulling up their trousers while in the distance there’s a diminishing clanking of a goat bell as the lion buggers off with Billy.

The situation is such that there is speculation of schism. This would be very troubling, as it would mean that English churches would no longer be able to justify collections for their sister churches in Africa. On the plus side, it also means that hideous and poorly carved ‘thank you’ gifts from African villages for their nice new school would no longer require storage in the vicarage. Instead, the English churches would have to collect for the poorer parishes in the UK, where, for instance, the vicar only takes one foreign holiday each year, or where he has to iron his own vestments.

A town Christmas/a country Christmas

One of my favourite Sherlock Holmes stories is the adventure of the blue carbuncle. Not just because it’s as clever and inventive as one would expect any Sherlock Holmes story to be, but because, rather unusually, it takes place at Christmas. Not a Christmas in the sleeping, sinister countryside, but Christmas in London. There are several scenes in London locations, one of the most evocative e being Covent Garden. I was listening to the story on my iPod once and happened to be strolling through Covent Garden at the time and, all things considered, I think it would be better served if it were populated by tradesmen selling geese and so on rather that the twats that impose themselves on the tourists by busking. Sorry, but painting yourself silver and standing very still is not performance art, it’s a sign of mental illness.

Dickens, who to all intents and purposes invented the modern Christmas, had different ideas about the yule season. Despite being a Londoner his invocation of the season to be jolly was a country Christmas, described in the Pickwick Papers when Pickwick and his fellow Pickwickians spend Christmas at Dingly Dell.

Despite the many attractions that town offers during the Christmas season, such as having drunk secretaries throw up on your shoes after a Christmas party, or being arrested for urinating against the offside rear wheel of a police car when caught short, the countryside does have its own pleasures at Christmas.

Of course, the principal and most celebrated one is being able to drive home from the pub while pissed but there are others, and for kids too. Much is made of the powers of the Nintendo Wii to entertain, and entertain more than one person at a time. In the countryside this same effect is produced by daubing a stick with some cow shit and chasing your siblings around. Not only is it more fun, cow shit is a good deal scarier than Resident Evil 4.

Life in London can get Dickensian at Christmas by the simple addition of beggers along the Strand. There was a fellow at Temple tube station recently begging and he had, not the traditional doggie on a string, but a soft toy dog to keep him company. The thing was, the soft toy dog was a cuddle rotweiller, if that’s not an oxymoron. I was a little taken aback that anyone would have a soft toy version of a vicious baby-eating breed, but I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

In the tourist tat shops of London you can get dolls of guardsmen, policemen and even the royals. Maybe they should also sell real life action figures; ‘Screaming Mad Jeff’ or ‘Smelly Dan’. And it doesn’t need to just be local characters, there are all sorts of people that make up the London street scene; ‘lost Japanese tourist’, ‘Australian backpacker who stops right at the top of the fucking escalator so that nobody can get past him and then unfolds a fucking map aggggggghhhhh’ (backpack sold separately’).

I’d like to see some Dickens action figures, or plush toys. How about a plush Bill Sykes and Bullseye, let’s see the grumpy mad bastard batter Nancy to death when he’s made of felt. Then you could have the graveyard adventure set from the start of ‘Great Expectations’, Pip and Magwitch sold separately. That scene has put the frighteners on countless kids through the years, why not bring it to life in the safety of your own living room.

The Victorians were lucky enough to have Charles Dickens to invent Christmas for them and do more or less a perfect job. Considering some of the ideas, like having a tree indoors, I think he did a pretty good job, prezzies, eating food that never gets consumed at any other time of year (nuts and marzipan, when else do you eat them, eh?). For mere mortals, it takes a family dynamic to invent Christmas traditions, like having a row, or playing special family games like ‘hunt the remote’ or that old favourite ‘find the batteries’. My addition to tradition is ‘if anyone talks during the Doctor Who special, I’ll kill them.’

Merry Christmas!

On shaving

A combination of sensitive skin, idleness and exposure to Indiana Jones as a role model at an impressionable age has left me with the firm belief that it’s quite acceptable to shave once or twice a week and, for the rest of the time, sport the sort of stubble usually seen abaze in a field in East Anglia. This is not a view shared by the rest of the household and a recent poll saw 50% of the occupants of the house firmly of the belief that it made me look ‘sinister’, ‘like a Pikey’ and, most cuttingly, ‘old’.

More pleasingly, it did result in the gift of a new shaving cream. Over the years I’ve tried just about every shaving cream known to man, and a few unknown ones on the basis that badger-fat has to be good for something. They have all been crap. This new stuff though, is fantastic, you walk away from the mirror feeling quite the torff and just effeminate smelling enough to arouse the damp curiosity of the ladies about your sexuality.

Even with the addition of this new soothing balm, there’s no getting away from the fact that shaving oneself is a ghastly business and an everyday waste of time. You wake up, shave and what have you done, what have you achieved. At most, you are back to how you looked this time yesterday morning. It’s woeful. Best result is that you shave off an actual beard and walk away from the mirror looking a little younger and a lot less like a communist agitator.

Being shaved, is another matter entirely. Shaving should be done with a cut throat razor, by somebody else. In a perfect world it is done by one’s man. When one is travelling it can be done by a young foreign girl. When one is on safari – and at no other time – it is permissible to be shaved by a friend. Or one’s wife.

A friend of mine recently got married in Sorrento, not far from Naples where the cut throat razor has, alas, all but passed into history now that the local thugs prefer to settle scores with guns and scooters. The morning of his wedding he went to get a haircut and a shave and, in broken Italian pantomimed what he wanted, hoping to God that the chap was not about to shave his head and give his beard a short back and sides. The Italian was an artist with the scissors and, when it came to the shave, it was right and proper – the hot towel to make the bristles soft, the cut throat razor wielded like a man who had learned the craft in the back-alleys of Naples and then, something a bit Turkish. The fellow inserted a lit cotton bud into my friends ear. This was, even by foreign standards, a bit off and my friend was just about to say something, most probably ‘Aggggggghhhhhhhh!’ when the bud was removed and the practice repeated on the other ear. Barely had my friend time to realise that the barber was taking a novel and somewhat psychotic approach to the removal of nuisance ear-tufts when he had a burning rag shoved up his nose. The stench of singed nostril hair was quickly covered by a splash of after shave lotion, explaining to some degree why foreign men always stink of the damned stuff. And my friend tottered out of the barbers slightly light-headed and wondering if he was being secretly filmed.

Frankly, that sounds like the ideal way to start the day. If, basically, your head has been set on fire before you’ve had your kippers, then you’re well based to face whatever trivia trials the remains of the day may wish to throw at you.

As for domestic shaving? It combines dull with dangerous. If you did something every day that left you bleeding now and again, you’d soon bloody well stop it. The whole industry is geared to making money out of misfortune, I’m sure the razor blade companies are in cahoots with the folk that make face balms, tissue paper and when it’s really bad, sticking plasters.

The sound of the 21st Century

I used to be very uncomfortable with the idea that I might harbour prejudices. Then, as I grew older, I became more comfortable as I realised that most of my prejudices are not just knee-jerk irrational dislikes, but actually informed and reasoned feelings that save me a lot of time; if somebody is from a particular social group I’ve developed an opinion of, chances are I won’t like them and frankly, I don’t have the time to find out if I’m right or wrong. These days, I’m so comfortable with my prejudices that I become irritated that they are not shared. Somewhere along the line my prejudices have turned into views. This is dangerous, a prejudice is something you keep to yourself. A view is something you find yourself expressing, often at an inappropriate moment, usually just as everyone else at the party stops talking, occasionally just before everyone stops talking and, although they resume talking to one another, nobody resumes conversation with you.

My prejudices are fairly straightforward and, although I freely admit they are to a greater or lesser extent ugly and poisonous, they form a useful social shorthand. There are over six billion people on this planet and simply not enough time to meet each and every one and form an opinion of their character. That’s why it’s so very convenient that so many of them are foreign, as this immediately excludes them from being the sort of person I’d like to spend time with, unless it’s to order food or drink from, or liberate natural energy resources from.

Some prejudices are still very much in development. Take my dislike of vegetarians for instance. For years I disliked vegetarians because on the whole they are so affected that they are further up their own arse than sage and onion suffing goes up a goose at Christmas. There are two sorts of vegetarians, the sort who don’t eat meat but do eat fish, and cheese, and veal and bacon and pork. Okay, not the last three but for fuck’s sake, if you eat an animal, you’re not a vegetarian. Then there’s the other sort, who don’t even wear leather shoes. Are these people insane? Sweaty feet in plastic shoes and not having immediate access to steak and kidney pie is no way to live life in the 21st century.

But now I’m starting to wonder if it’s more affliction than affectation. I mean it can’t be easy being a vegetarian, certainly not when I back you into a corner and start having a go at you for being immoral on two counts, firstly because the only way to ensure animal welfare in the food business is to buy more free range organic stuff and secondly because anyone who has any kind of special diet bollocks that if not medical, for instance if you won’t eat lamb because your guru once got his dick caught in a sheep or something, is immoral in a world where people are starving. Don’t eat meat? Great, sit in the fucking corner while we FedEx your roast dinner to some poor starving sod in the Congo.

Having developed a rich and diverse suite of prejudices and a side helping of petty resentments at things that irritate me, I’d have thought that I had my full quota of things that make me seeth to a degree quite out of proportion to their actual irritation value; but I’ve acquired a new one. It’s the sound of the 21st Century, the beep. Not the ringtone, which, Christ alive, is irritating enough and let me tell you that as somebody who uses public transport the only bloody use for a fucking novelty ringtone is to allow you to locate the offending phone and then batter it to atoms with a hammer, before doing the same to its owner. The beep is everywhere, it’s the missed call, the text message and then it beeps every few minutes as a reminder. My prejudice? Thinking that the lazy sods who just let it bleep on rather than reach into their bag and get the phone are always either fat, or soon will be.

Travelling in style

I’m writing this on my laptop, sitting in a first class carriage watching the English countryside slide past. There are slower ways of seeing England, but there are few better. This is especially true is you like canals. The railways may have killed off the canals but, with the permanent way being laid so often next to the waterway, travellers today can now look at hundreds of miles of the canal network as it passes at high speed. Of course, this has it’s downside, travelling by train is fantastic (you drink while somebody else drives at insane speed, that kind of arrangement is only available elsewhere on shocking council estates when you are in the passenger seat of a stolen car), because ever now and then you look out and see a boat captained by somebody smoking a pipe, wearing a moleskin waistcoat and a beard that society would disapprove of, accompanied by a dog with a kerchief for a collar and you know, you just bloody know, that not only is he carefree but he has picked up a couple of dainty female passengers who are into free love and experimentation and are, at this moment, in the galley making him a bacon sandwich. This is in contrast to life on the road, where the only passengers in the cars of, for instance, sales reps, are murdered hitchhikers.

The better you travel, the more you are rewarded. Travel by air and what do you get – you get to breath the air that the guy in front of you, the one with lank hair and a cough, was breathing half an hour ago. You get to sit in a seat that’s too small in an airplane that’s too crowded and if you get drunk enough to actually blot out the pain, you’ll be considered too drunk to be a passenger.

Travel by car and you have the illusion of freedom but, in reality, you’re just swept along with everyone else. There’s a reason that pictures of a highway at night, with the taillights all surging in the same direction, looks like bloodflow or a river, because you’re in the current. Don’t believe me? Try swerving across four lanes of motorway and look at the reaction you’ll provoke.

Travel by tube and you are normally asked to leave cinemas whenever there’s a horror sequence set on the tube because no atrocity quite matches what you once had to go through that time when you were bursting for the loo, the train stopped in a tunnel and the lady in front of you had a PVC handbag. The resulting six month stretch in Parkhurst almost erased the embarrassment of the moment, but not quite.

Travel by boat is best of all. Slower than driving, a bit quicker than walking and all rivers, eventually, flow to the sea so the possibilities are limitless.

(Interjection – it’s suddenly got so dark outside the train that I thought somebody had closed the curtains in the sky. It is, in fact, simply the traditional laden northern sky). (Or a tunnel, I’m a bit pissed on red wine).

Which is why, I think, I’ve recently seen the VW camper van as my vehicle of choice. It’s not unlike a boat in its lines and when you put up that roof extension thingie, it’s like raising a sail. All in all, I rather like camper vans, I just love the idea of having everything you need, stove, bed, telly, to hand and, best of all, when you fall out with the neighbours, you can drive off.

A camper van is very, very different to a caravan. The caravan is used by two sorts of people, wife-swapping cannibals of Welsh descent who enjoy nothing more than confounding senior maths lecturers by causing traffic jams where there should be none; and pikies.

As for global warming and pollution – fuck it. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a price worth paying for me to be able to sit on the train (product of the industrial revolution, where it all started), listening to my iPod and sipping red wine. Mind you, I’d miss the snowboarding.

Working from home

I am working from home today (it’s the first really beautiful winter morning of the season this morning. Actually, that may not be quite true, but it’s certainly the first one I have seen. I was up rather early this morning, roused desperately early from a deep slumber by a twanging, banging hangover so grim that I originally thought of writing an article for ‘The Lancet’ about it but have now decided that it is actually worthy of its own book, as Chapter 1 alone would be barely sufficient to deal with what appears to have happened to my tongue overnight. Upon further consideration, maybe non-fiction is not the best way to describe all the effects, possibly an Opera would be more fitting, I wonder if Philip Glass is available? I am trying to abate the symptoms through an arsenal of remedies varying from the traditional; ‘chalkie friends’ AKA ‘two para’ AKA a couple of paracetamol, through the sensible; tomato juice, and finally the desperate; a tea that is described as ‘blended to recover’ and would appear to contain most of the contents of an English hedgerow except a sleeping hedgehog and a Tesco carrier bag impaled on a bush, and I’m not too sure about the hedgehog judging by the aftertaste. This is truly a desperate measure as I can assure you I am the sort of chap who views any tea other than ‘English breakfast’ with deep and I would say justified suspicion. At my place of business one has to share a tea point with others who are broader in their tastes and I am aware that people drink fruit teas. What’s the point? It’s simply a cup of hot squash. The women who drink fruit teas are invariably the sort of thin that is achieved not through diet, self denial and exercise, but because they are the sorts who lack the foresight when buying a sausage roll for lunch to purchase a second to eat on the way back from Greggs, so satisfying any hunger pangs and allowing you to really enjoy the explosion of hot fat and gristle wrapped in pastry that makes a sausage roll a sausage roll. That and the amphetamine suppositories they bought off the internet from some country that ends in ‘-istan’ and is unlikely to get EU membership while more of their citizens live in caravans than houses because they like it that way. The men who drink fruit teas are either homosexulists or closet homosexulists who are doing it to impress the limp women. One thing is true for both sexes, there is some sort of link between fruit teas and limp, lifeless, greasy hair. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s because deprived of a proper brew, hair lacks the energy to fulfil its main purpose in life; get tangled in brushes and consume a disproportionate amount of disposable income in care and styling products. No? Just me then. But my point is that a tea blended to recover sounds like borderline voodoo, what’s the next step? Catholicism? I’m currently caught in LaGrange point of the hangover where I’d really like something to eat but the thought repulses me. There’s a jar of cockles sitting in the fridge. This has, of late, become a dirty habit of mine, consumption of cooked cockles sold in a jar of, essentially, brine. Yet they do something to them that makes them taste goooooood. They are also something of an immoral treat (hence all the tastier) as there’s a whiff of gangmasters and illegal immigrants forced to do dangerous digging on tidal flats about the whole cockle industry. At least when you buy them from a stall in Norfolk you can rest assured that the guy selling it obtained them the traditional way, by getting his young kids up before dawn and out there on the beach, sobbing in the rain and darkness while digging away feverishly while the rising tide laps at their ankles, or facing the threat of a bloody good slap. Traditional you see?) and my levels of procrastination have reached such heights that I’m even side-tracking myself from writing a blog entry about it.

Fit for nothing

I’m writing this in the grip of a hangover so vile that I am seriously considering retaining the services of an exorcist to shift it. It’s not just the headache, although that’s bad enough, it’s the way that, these days, a hangover seems to affect my entire body, it’s like having the flu, indeed it’s so much like having the flu that I crave lemsip and am starting to think that I might actually have the flu, a stealth flu that is concealing itself behind my hangover.

It’s not just the body that feels like one big clogged sinus, it’s the psyche too. Oh, there’s the shame and regret naturally, not exactly on a par with being discovered wanking through the letterbox of the girl you have a crush on, but niggling, nonetheless.

Indeed, I feel I may actually have strayed into the realm of the exo-hangover, a hangover so bad that I actually need to externalise its properties. This would certainly seem to be the case judging from my last visit to the loo. I’m no feaceologist but I’m pretty sure that water is not supposed to react like that when poo hits it.

All in all, I’d quite like to stick a hose in my mouth and turn on the water until every orifice, pore and organ is sluiced clean from within, turning me into some sort of ornamental fountain of virtue. But as that sort of treatment is only available to suspected terrorists, I’ll have to settle for paracetamol and coffee.

Exercise is supposed to be good for a hangover. Possibly this is a reverse of the stealth flu syndrome, where you start exercising and, at some point, your hangover symptoms cannot compare with the discomfort you are feeling as a result of your strenuous activity and leaves in a pouty huff. Apparently if you exercise for long enough, your body releases dolphins or something and you get a ‘natural high’. This is surely tosh; if it were true then pubs would have treadmills instead of alcohol.

Then again, it might explain why people who go to the gym always look so smug, at least the ones who can last for longer than 30 minutes on the treadmill without throwing up.

It might also explain why I was in such a ridiculously good mood at the conclusion of my bike ride this weekend. My pedalling was not a result of a virtuous desire for exercise but rather a need to go to the shops to buy sausage and the car being elsewhere at the time. It’s uphill all the way to the next village and by the time I got there I was cursing Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton for making it look so easy.

The trip back though was fantastic, downhill all the way, over pavements strewn with fallen autumn leaves, it was like gliding through a carpet gold, all the while singing along with George Thurgood ‘One burbon, one scotch, one beer’ and punctuating it with the occasional ‘wheeeeeeeeeee’ of joy for good measure.

The bike is so, so much better than jogging or being a member of a gym. This is because as a bloke it fulfils all your accessorise requirements, you can strap loads of stuff to it, even stuff that doesn’t need batteries. It also fulfils a bloke’s wanderlust requirements: see an interesting side trail, then down it you go. Okay, there’s a danger that you might unexpectedly ride out into mid-air before having an impromptu industrial heritage experience or, as it’s otherwise known, a dip in a canal and there’s always the danger of coming face to horn with a bull, but overall the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

The drawback is trying to convince others that the time you have spent essentially finding a new way to get mud up your back entitles you to tell them about it. People who stopped cycling as soon as they started driving are unlikely to be impressed by tales of off-road daring-do, even when you show them the broken branches sticking to your helmet and the blood and matted animal fur stuck to the pump you used to defend yourself.

The Christmas Horror

There’s a time and a place for horror and this is not, apparently, when you are putting your nine year old nephew to bed and you tell him the story of the ghost of the little boy who haunts his house, a little boy who was beaten to death by his enraged uncle with a hammer because he would not go to bed when he was told. (Success with this story? You’ll probably need the sequel: the ghost of the boy who drowned in his own pee because he kept wetting the bed).

M.R. James wrote horror stories that are traditionally associated with Christmas. Not because they take place at Christmas but because he was a house master at Eton and, on Christmas Eve, would invite the senior boys to his study and after plying them with sherry tell them ghost stories. At the turn of the century such behaviour was quite normal, well, about as normal as having one of the greatest masters of the ghost story genre who ever lived being a house master. OFSTEAD would, I am sure, have something to say about such behaviour but judging by the behaviour of today’s senior boys at public school, you’d have a hell of a job getting the spliff out of their mouths for long enough to ply them with sherry.

The Christmas connection has been reinforced by the BBC who, on and off for the past decade or two, have broadcast MR James stories in their ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’ slot. Sometimes an eminent ac-tor plays James himself (memorably Christopher Lee and Robert Powell) narrating a story from a cosy looking study. If you think it’s shocking to regale your nephew with ‘the story of the hammered child’, that’s as bloody nothing to the effect of an impressionable young teen, up late because it’s Christmas, tuning innocently into BBC2 and hearing, all unprepared, the story of ‘the Mezziotint’. I’ve been terrified of paintings, the BBC, MR James, Robert Powell and Christmas ever since.

James’s stories, good on teevee, are great on the page but reading them at any other time of year just feels, well, wrong.

The same has to be said for that other master of horror, H P Lovecraft. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing quite like an initial impression and the first time I read Lovecraft was on a summer holiday in a caravan park in Great Yarmouth. It was, I seem to recall, great weather almost every day, not that this mattered to me because I had discovered that the campsite’s amusement arcade had a Star Wars video game and was spending quite a lot of time using the force, and most of my pocket money, trying to blow up that freaking Death Star.

One day though the fog rolled in and we were pretty much confined to the caravan – never a problem for a family that likes to read. So I read my Lovecraft omnibus; mostly about old sea-towns on the New England coast that, cut off by geography fog and inbreeding, are hosts to diabolical going on. I think I finally got to sleep about seven years later.

Since that formative/traumatic experience I’ve always associated Lovecraft with the season of mists, except The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I associate with beads of rain falling against a car window. But all the stories are associated with a sort of nagging dread.

Judging from their proliferation on the shelves of most bookshops (and that’s just Stephen King), people still love a good horror story, or even a mediocre horror story. There’s something about reading a horror story and I think it may be that one can always close the book and trap the horror safely between the pages. Certainly if you want horror in real life, you can simply watch the news or the ‘Why? Factor’ or something. Of course, sometimes the horror escapes the page and follows you, which is why it’s perfectly acceptable to check under the bed and inside the closet before retiring and to always keep handy the ultimate ghost deterrent – a camera, I mean, have you ever seen a convincing picture of one?