The Cult of Apple is now the Cult of Moleskine

The first stationary was, appropriately, immobile.  Early Man used cave walls and ceilings to record pictures of Woolly Mammoth hunts and other cardio activities.  The first cave painting was probably followed by the first scathing review, possibly followed by the first critic being chased from the cave, and being trampled to death by a Woolly Mammoth.

Fast forward a few thousand years to dawn on the Nile, where Pharaoh has gathered his architects for the latest tomb project management meeting.  Folk are still putting stuff on walls, although this being a more modern society they carve as well as paint.  That’s progress.  Papyrus is the latest thing but wait, one of the younger architects has papyrus that is somehow thicker, creamier and of a heavier weight than the sheets of papyrus used by the other architects.  Surely, this fellow must be cleverer.  He gets to speak first and suggests that if they cut costs by making the tomb pointy instead of a cube as was originally suggested, Pharaoh can afford to take another two dozen handmaidens with him into the afterlife.  Good help is hard to find and so Pharaoh agrees, meeting adjourned, Pharaoh goes off to stand in profile for the rest of the day for his official portrait, and the rest of the architects know two things, that they too must get this papyrus of authority, and that this cocky kid will be crocodile fodder by sundown.

Vegetable matter continues to be pulped for paper to this very day.  There have, of course, been a couple of diversions along the way.  Velum is the writing surface of choice if you want to record something for posterity and really, really, don’t like goats.

Today, despite technological advances such as the Apple Newton, stationary and paper is more popular than ever.

Indeed, it’s reached cult status.  When Apple were opening up their new stores all over the planet, they were likened to temples, with all the staff dressed like members of a religious order and Apple users showing a devotion to the company’s products that is surely more faith based than reasoned.  Like the Church, Apple continues to rely on the devotion of its followers to get it through scandals or, as Apple prefers to call them, iOS updates.  I’m not saying that changing the interface on my iPhone is as bad as diddling choirboys, I’m just saying that at least the Church has acknowledged that that kind of behaviour is a problem.

The analogue equivalent of the Cult of Apple is the Cult of Moleskine, or stationaryphelia.

Over the last few years, the Moleskine has made something of a comeback.  For all I know, or care, the brand was invented in 2005 but the thing looks as though it has been in the pocket of the combat jacket of war correspondents everywhere from the Normandy landings to the bars of Saigon.  It is, it has to be said, a fabulous product, having a cover thick enough to act as a reasonable writing surface on its own, and bearing paper that can take the ink of a fountain pen without blotching like a teen in a titty bar.  I don’t think it could stop a bullet, blade or broken bottle but I do think it’s sturdy enough to beat off an enraged artist who has read your piece on her latest exhibition and is trying to pummel you screaming, unaccountably, ‘to the mammoths with you!’.

The value in a decent notebook is twofold.  The first is that even if you are writing ‘eggs, milk, foot cream’ during a meeting, it looks like you are the sort of person who is writing ‘synergy’.  A good notebook is, in business or art or recreation, a commitment to a serious attempt to do something.  Once it’s in there, it’s there forever.  This is not thermal fax paper, this is a cave wall.

The second is an extension of the first.  If you treat yourself to a decent notebook, you make a commitment to yourself to be worthy of those who the advertisers would have you think used this brand before you.

Or choose a new brand, and be the one others will follow.

Under an orange sky

The sky turned orange.  Was this Armageddon?  Was it the result of Brexit, or the fault of the orange buffoon squatting in the White House, as these are the two Modern Social Evils most often linked with catastrophe, usually for good reason?

No, it was the result of storm force winds picking up dust from the Sahara and the wildfires on the Iberian Peninsular.  Thanks to Google, everyone knew this, and so there wasn’t the sort of low level weather anxiety that we would have enjoyed twenty years ago, religious awe that we would have experienced a hundred years ago or primal anxiety and possibly the sacrifice of the Most Unpopular Member Of The Tribe that would have been the result a few thousand years ago.  And in some ways we should mourn the passing of those simpler, if not happier, times, before the Internet spoiled wonder, awe and a primal fear of clouds.

Just because we knew the cause didn’t make things less impressive.  From about two o’clock onwards, the sky did start to go a very odd colour, normally only found in the 80s action films of directors who loved a bit of a tobacco filter.  By three o’clock, it was unusually dark and cars were driving along with their lights on.  It was not unlike that sort of sickly yellow light you occasionally get before a thunderstorm, or in any city where the regime in charge think a climate accord is just another way for the rich nations to oppress developing countries.

It was actually very impressive.  Everyone loves an unusual weather event and even if this one didn’t result in an alien invasion or a rain of badgers, or rain of rain for that matter, it was still odd enough to be unsettling in that creepy fun way when you know the reason for something, but the part of your brain that’s not that long out of the cave is thinking that if this doesn’t end soon, we might have to sacrifice Darren from Accounts to appease the gods and make the sun shine again.

Inspiration

If you’re lucky, there’s beauty all around you.  If you are very lucky, it’s in the mirror too and you can make a living selling make up or clothes that normal people can’t afford or look good in.

There’s an art to appreciating beauty though.  In the appropriately titled film ‘American beauty’, there’s a scene where a boy shows a girl a video of a plastic bag caught in a breeze, endlessly circulating.  This, he breathes in solemn tones, is the most beautiful thing he has ever filmed.  This, 400 people in a cinema auditorium think, is a reflection on the need for American youth to get out more.  It’s at this point that you realise that any movie containing such a scene must be more up its own arse than a video of a rectal exam.  Anyone who has witnessed a plastic bag on the wing in the wild will know that they are not to be trusted and can attack, wrapping themselves round your leg or shoe and leaving you no option but to shake off said plastic bag by doing a ritual dance that, performed in public, makes you look like a one-man Morris troupe.

It does pose the question though, whether true beauty is to be found in nature, in mankind’s creation or, like a plastic bag in an updraft, in a combination of both?

Picture a new cathedral.  Beautiful?  Unlikely.

Now picture a proper Norman job, the sort that took a good couple of centuries to build, where you capped out the building your great-grandfather dug the foundations for and which has stood sentinel over the landscape for a good few centuries.  Fresh carved, gargoyles and grotesques are probably not best described as beautiful but, after a couple of hundred years weathering, the carving that was started by man is finished by nature as the lines and features of the stone are smoothed and, through architectural botox, a building becomes landscape.

And that’s just the outside.  Wait until you get to the gift shop and tea room.

Or not, the thing to do is head straight for the gift shop and pick up a guide to the cathedral, because if not you will spend the rest of your visit wondering what’s the nave and what’s the choir.  Like being able to name every wildflower in a hedgerow (ragwort, bramble, pornmag, tizercan) knowledge of the correct architectural terms for different parts of medieval buildings is something you think you should have, and feel guilty about not possessing.  Like an ethnic friend.

Places, and people, can be described as inspiring.  The Greeks, early market leaders in matters poetical and theoretical, outsourced inspiration to muses.  These creatures were capricious and could be found in various places, oddly enough frequently attractive places that were quiet and allowed a chap to think about what rhymed with ‘trireme’, or how to found a new branch of philosophy that would get you the girls, or just how to fuck goats.  That last one is a bit of a shocker I concur, but these were less sophisticated times and hanging around in a glade can get lonely.

Muses persist to this day.  Usually they are women.  Unusually they inspire men.  Usually they have really, really good cheekbones.  Rarely do they advise on advanced trigonometry or how to romance ruminants, and the world is arguably a poorer place for it.

Other places where inspiration can be found evidently include the bottom of bottles of alcohol, especially if one is a poet.  And stimulants appear to be a common feature, as, given the number of people sitting in coffee shops with laptops open in front of them with the phrase ‘SCENE ONE’ or ‘CHAPTER ONE’ on the screen, followed by a big white space, latte would appear to inspire.

Anyone who has ever picked up a bat, a ball, a pen or a brush has, at some point, probably been inspired by somebody or something.  It can be a moment of genius or a moment of heroism.

And some of those that have been inspired may go on to inspire others, and not even know it, like the master mason who carved the gargoyle.

Paisley Parked

RIP Ian Paisley, who has passed.  Once, opinion on his passing would have divided along religious lines, with 'sad loss' or 'thank Christ' being your reaction depending on your view of Rome - tourist spot with traffic issues or the home of Popish plots and a den of inequity where the inequisition sport large hats.  Latterly of course, peace came to Ireland, former foes worked together and a whole country united in their dislike of politicians whatever their religious bent.
One hopes that if peace came to Ireland, it also came to the Paisley household, with there being at least a little less shouting about the place.
On hearing the news of his passing, somebody asked me 'So, where do you reckon he's gone then?', meaning that even for politicians there was a final reckoning, and more uncomfortable places to end up than across the desk from Paxman in the 'Newsnight' studio.
Wherever the former firebrand has ended up, one thing is for sure, his passing is a sad, sad loss to the 'Better Together' campaign.  Nobody could bellow 'NO!' quite like the Rev. Paisley.

Let's get wed!

This morning, shambling back through the park after a Saturday morning run, sweating chablis, we wandered past the park’s popular wedding reception venue and, being nosy buggers, nebbed through the windows to see if it was set for a do.  The bright March sunlight reflected back from snow-white tablecloths and made pleasingly large wine glasses twinkle.  The colour scheme, it would appear, was purple. 
This caused some debate with references to pensioners, Jenny Joseph and Bridget Jones.  Who, we wondered, had a marriage with a whiff of lavender?  One of our party snapped their fingers and announced ‘Gays.  It’s the village’s first gay wedding’.
Parking possibly offensive sexual stereotyping, discussion moved straight to universal surprise that gay marriage should finally become a reality under a conservative government, and not only a tory government, but under a prime minister so Maggiesque that some suspect him of being whipped up in a lab, cultured from a greasy bit of Thatcher’s handbag.
The introduction of gay marriage was, of course, David Cameron’s big idea to de-toxify the image of the Conservative party, and I am sure that Dave is pleased as punch that this has happened in the same week that the very same Conservative party have banned toddlers sending their parents home-made birthday cards if mum or dad are in prison, a move so despicable that it led the Taliban to issue a rare press release, simply stating ‘steady on’, possibly.
Gay marriage is very welcome, but of course is also a safe policy to introduce, as if you answer to the question ‘should people be discriminated against simply because of their sexual orientation?’ ‘yes’ then that puts you on the same spectrum as people who don’t think girls should be educated, an UKIP.
The news was full of midnight weddings, including one glorious clip of a couple of chaps who had just got hitched, with one confessing he couldn’t remember it clearly as it was all a ‘blur’.  Every single husband in the world listening to that clip interpreted the moment of silence that followed that statement as the bloke’s new husband thinking ‘wait ‘till I get you home!’.  Welcome to married life chaps.
Of course, there are those who are not in favour of gay marriage, such as that UKIP buffoon who claimed that the Prime Minister’s plans to introduce gay marriage caused the floods.  I understand that UKIP are climate change deniers but this was taking things to a whole new level and, if one wanted to enter the whole gay marriage/meteorological effect debate, one might remark that 29 March 2014 sees England in glorious sunshine and, even if it had rained, chances are there would have been a rainbow somewhere, which would have been appropriate too.
Of course, what drove the tories might have been the realisation that marriage is good for the economy.  By that, I don’t mean that the institution of marriage leads to the sort of stability that economists like, but that it costs a fucking fortune to get hitched.  From the rings to the bummymoon, the gay marriage boom will be a welcome shot in the arse for business from jewellers to travel agents and, from the look of it this morning, manufacturers of purple food dye.
Apparently there are a few religious types who aren’t very keen on gay marriage, considering that the proper place for a same-sex relationship is between a catholic priest and choirboy.  Luckily, as I heard somebody say in sentence that killed any further debate stone dead, marriage is a function of the state, not of the church.  Anyone about to argue differently suddenly had anyone who got hitched in a registry office quietly cough behind them, and that was that.  I strongly suspect that, ironically, anyone suggesting that a couple who were not married in church are not married in the eyes of god would feel some spectacular Old Testament wrath, or at the very least, some Church of England indifference.  At the end of the day, it probably only matters if you are married in the eyes of the people you love, who have your John Lewis gift-list.  Oh, and probably the tax man too.  And Ikea.

The Pope - one year on

A year ago the Pope shocked the world by being just about the only world leader not to use Twitter to make an important announcement – he’s off!

Pope news!  The Pope announced he is to retire.  This came as something of a shocking surprise for, well, absolutely everybody, as the firm belief held by all was that Popes were supposed to expire rather than retire.  Following the announcement there was a lot of speculation about why the Pope had taken this unusual red-shoed step.  The common reason; being able to spend more time with your grandchildren, does not apply in this case and, if that is the real reason, is unlikely to form part of any official press release from the Vatican.

The announcement allowed the media to do what they increasingly love to do most of all, which is look up the entry for the subject they are reporting on Wikipedia so that we don’t have to, rephrase it to avoid copyright infringement, don’t bother with a fact check because in this case the more outlandlish the reported fact the more likely it is to be true, and then broadcast it.  There was also  endless speculation, especially about who the new Pope will be.  Let’s be clear, speculation is simply gossip distributed by people wearing ties.

The most intense speculation was about whether the new Pope will be ‘non European’.  ‘Non European’ means coming from either Africa or South America and is possibly newspeak for ‘Black’.  One could tell from the way the newsreaders said the phrase that they were not sure about it, is it a racial slur, or just a quick way to describe somebody not of European heritage?  Safe bet is that if it is the latter, then it’s the former too but hey, who’s got the time to say ‘from Africa or South America’ and, if you do, is it ‘Africa or South America’ or ‘South America or Africa’?  Better to just say ‘foreign’ and nod meaningfully, like you would if you were in a pub in the home counties.

An African or South American Pope would, apparently, have been a big deal, but hardly a surprise.  Whilst Europe has lurched towards secularism, mostly as a result of smirking smart-arses writing the word ‘Jedi’ next to ‘Religion?’ on their census form and thinking themselves positively Wildeian, Roman Catholicism is very much a strong force in the emerging religious markets of Africa and South America (or South America or Africa depending on your geographical bias).  This is because they are both full of developing countries where the promise of a better afterlife, possibly including meat for dinner three times a week and a whole month going by without some ghastly ethnic violence or natural disaster, is very attractive.  No wonder these places like religion, it’s just like the old testament.

Of course, the real reason that the Pope decided to step down was probably connected to Twitter.  It’s one thing to get a news report, every day, that another person in your organisation is a peado, it’s quite another to have to face it when you fire up Twitter because you just have to retweet that link to a hilarious Youhootube clip of an squirrel and a row of vodka shots, and find that are the subject of quite a number of messages referring to you as ‘kiddifiddler in chief’.  

When you’re Pope and find out that in addition to having fewer followers than Stephen Fry you get droves of unfollowers every time another peadopriest is exposed, it can get a bit wearing.  

For any figure of authority, Twitter should be treated like a toxic substance, that it is the source of a cavalcade of condemnation is the polite way to put it.  The reality is that if you attract the ire of Twitter, a river of shit meets a tide of abuse and, accordingly, surfing is unpleasant.

Being Pope is, I suspect, something of a thankless task.  It’s something that you take on once you are past retirement age (like a job at B&Q but without the benefit of nicking stuff to supplement your wages) and you get the blame for everything and the credit for nothing.  It’s unfair, and unkind, to expect somebody to work until they drop, not even B&Q do that, officially.  

Postcard from Yorkshire: Fountains Abbey

After seeing Fountains Abbey, an eight hundred and something year old ruin of an Abbey complex, there is an argument that all places of worship should be open to the sky. This not only allows one to glimpse the wonder of God's creation at first hand but, crucially, allows God to keep an eye on those monks who claim to work in his name. Choirboys. Say no more.

The Abbey may be a ruin, but The National Trust manage to keep at least four tea shops fully functioning. These being Yorkshire teashops, they sell cakes. I had a scone roughly the size of a bus, with enough cream on it to clog the arteries of a mammoth. It was truly a thing of wonder, even if I could still feel it lodged in my lower intestine some hours later.

Luckily, the grounds provide plenty of opportunity to walk off the substantial delights of the tea shop. As well as the Abbey, there is a grand house. Not quite a stately home, rather the sort of unpretentious massive pile that wealthy farmers built and which were regularly visited by royalty. With grand houses come grand gardens, and as well as woods and so on, there were formal gardens with straight waterways, polite waterfalls, rustic bridges and, of course, a folly or feature at every turn.


The rich, it would appear, liked only one thing more than building grand houses and grand gardens, and that was building classically inspired mini-temples and castles, essentially vantage points where they could look out over their grand houses and grand gardens and, of course, indulge in a bit of secluded aristocratic rumpy pumpy with visitors. One of the follies, an octagon tower, even had an artificial cave built next to it which functioned as a kitchen allowing the servants to prepare hot food to keep visitors' strength up between bouts of walking and illicit fumblings in the ha-ha. Something suggests that the invention of the thermos flask could not come quickly enough for members of the toiling classes.

The Abbey complex itself is immense and beautiful. Soaring columns and arches make one wonder how on earth the place stays open to the public without being swaddled in yellow and white tape with 'keep out' or at least 'hard hat area' written on it. Rather, the place is a vast adventure playground for children who run around in a perpetual state of over-excitement, while adults ponder if they can pick up a foam sword from the gift shop and dash around the ruins playing knights.


The nearby church is still intact, modern (by comparison, St Mary's is Victorian), small (by comparison) and very beautiful. It's delights include a spiral staircase to the organ lift that would appear to per-date the work of Crick and Watson by some decades, and some particularly colourful stained glass windows. These are made even more remarkable because, due to a fault in the paint, some of the figures are losing their faces.


As a result what would normally be an ordinary pious looking bloke with a beard is a blank space and what was Victorian suddenly looks terribly modern. The windows are very beautiful and, when lit from without by the glorious Yorkshire sun, colourful. As they depict scenes from the bible, and hence are usually pretty gruesome, it occasionally takes one a second or two to realise that the fellow kneeling piously is not surrounded by people holding scones in anticipation of a cream tea, but is in fact about to be martyred. This is usually a process that involves something unpleasant.

Looking down

There's a job vacancy at Lambeth Palace as the Funny Hat Wearer In Chief of Agnostics Anonymous has announced that after ten years of people being bitchy about his vestments behind his back, he is stepping down, no doubt to write a series of essays that essentially boil down to; 'I was right, sod the lot of you'. Applicants for this post are a short list of bishops from around the country but, like fishermen, surely the appointment panel (chaired by who, God?) should cast their nets wider. This appears to be a job where the most important role is telling people how to live their lives and commenting on the more pernicious aspects of Government policy, so surely the most ideal candidates are stand-up comedians and bloody bloody tabloid columnists.

These are two professions never short of an opinion, usually uninformed and always unaccountable, ideal credentials for leading a religious organisation, as nobody knows whether your pronouncements about the afterlife are right until it's too late.

The issue exercising the church and the tabloids at the moment is gay marriage. It's amazing that anyone would think that somebody should be deprived of the pleasure of marriage just because they happen to be a ulist. Certainly, it can't be an exclusively heterosexual skill set to continue living with somebody while compiling a never ending list of petty resentments.

It starts with a list, evolves into a book, then at some point becomes the big book of petty resentments. I know couples who can make a whole tragic mime from taking down the Big Book of Petty Resentments from the shelf, opening it up as one would a substantial tome and making an entry. I even know one couple who, when Mrs Big Book calmly announced that their Big Book of Petty Resentments had grown so substantial that they had moved it to a Kindle edition, Mr Big Book responded that he had had to outsource his resentment management to a call centre in Bangalore.

Looking down on the city, with a God's eye view, one thing becomes clear, problems on a human scale like just who can get married to whom fade into insignificance. If two chaps want to get married, then who is going to object. Certainly no married chap, who thinks two things, the first being that he doesn't see what all the fuss is about and the second being that if he has to spend Sunday mornings pretending to care about wallpaper patterns and wandering round garden centres, he doesn't seed why anyone else should get away with it just because they are confirmed batchalors, fans of musical theatre and recipients of the occasional cock.

It's important to get perspective on this, and also to see what others are saying. If your views on gay marriage align with those of people who also have robust views about women priests, women voting, women working at all and, indeed, women leaving the house, then you probably need to either realign your views in a hurry or sod off to Afghanistan to live in a cave with lots of other gritty misogynists who quickly find out that without the civilising presence of women, you develop questionable hygiene, your socks rot and you end up having the sort of relationship with one of the other fellows that, ironically, results in your wanting him to make an honest man of you.

There's no doubt that being an Archbishop should have its perks, chief among these being that everybody listens to you. The problem is that being the Archbishop of Canterbury means that everybody listened to you only long enough to work out what it is you are saying so that they can start arguing with you. Ending every day by slamming the office door shut, uncorking the alter wine and muttering 'I bet the Pope doesn't have to put up with this shit' is not conducive to developing the spirit of forgiveness.

Wearing a big hat and living in a palace though, those are some perks, possibly even more fun that telling people how to think and daydreaming about punching Richard Dawkins, really hard. First to do that - gets the job.

Postcard from Winchester - the cathedral

Winchester cathedral, possibly the finest example of a Norman cathedral ever to have a pop song written about it. It's home to quite a lot of distinguished remains. There's the tomb of Jane Austin, with an inscription so genteel that it completely omits to mention that she was a writer. This was because writing books about bonnets and so on was considered an unsuitable job for a woman at the time rather than her other accomplishments being so astonishing that the writing was very much an afterthought. The tomb is visited by three types of people, there are those who come to pay homage to the great writer, there are the Japanese, who appear to have a particular affection for her (just why is not clear, possibly it's the Japanese fascination with manners, or bonnets, or just that somebody some day started the rumour that Japanese people are fascinated with Jane Austin and so you notice them more than most. Everyone in Winchester is too polite to ask.), and there are people who are baffled that somebody who wrote a screenplay for a BBC three parter earlier in the year died without their hearing about it.

The other famous resident is St Swithen. If you want to prey for good weather, this is the tomb for you.

There is another, very famous resident - an Anthony Gormley statue donated by the artist that stands in the crypt. The figure stands holding a bowl and when the crypt floods every year, the water laps at the statue's knees. It's quite an eerie presence, standing alone in an empty (one hopes) crypt. Just what is he considering? Some say he contemplates his soul, others that he is pondering why anyone would build a cathedral on a spring that gushes to life every year when it rains in the hills.

One does the cathedral tourist thing, wandering around with head craned back, trying to take in the details and knowing that there are a thousand masons' marks and features hidden in the gloom or behind a pillar, knowable only to god. Ones wanders round muttering 'how did they do this?', the answer of course lying in either block and tackle, or alien assistance. Prayer may have come into it but a shitload of stone imported from France and a sustaining turnip soup for the workers is probably a better bet.


A special place among the kings and queens and saints and bishops and one lonely crusader is reserved for a statue of William Walker. Essentially, the cathedral was built on a marsh, and a spring. Obviously while the monks excelled at piety they were not the greatest surveyors in the world. So they put down a raft of trees and built the cathedral on those. A few centuries later and the building develops a list. One side of it needs to be underpinned, so they dig down and, the hole floods. How to work underwater? This is the turn of the century, and while the snorkel has been invented, sexy wet suits have not. So, a bloke called William Walker gets on his diving suit and, often working in complete darkness, replaces the rotting foundation with concrete blocks. He literally saved the entire cathedral with his bare hands, which is what the inscription on his memorial says. Not a bad epitaph. Also...straight to heaven!

While the the choir was practicing for the evenings performance. What's the only thing better than beautiful choral music in a cathedral? Free beautiful choral music in a cathedral!

The cathedral itself is one of those huge Norman 'we are here to stay' jobs that dominate the landscape and at the time would have given rise to lots of middle class angst as people sat around discussing how the thing was really not sympathetic with the surrounding landscape or the architecture that it was being built next to, except that when the Normans were building cathedrals there was no middle class, no such thing as angst, people were too busy subsistence farming turnips and dying at age thirty (like some sort of medieval 'Logan's Run') to mutter darkly about planning permission, and any architecture that the Normans didn't like near there cathedral quickly became either kindling or hardcore, depending on its construction.


Finally, one of the best features is the stained glass window. During the Civil War the Roundheads, to show their piety, broke all the windows and decorations in the cathedral. Oddly, this did not result in direct devine retribution, which was put off until the restoration, instead the monks gathered the bits of stained glass and hid them. Then when the restoration came they, er, restored the stained glass window. Except they didn't bother to re-assemble it as it was. Obviously not big jigsaw fans, the result was a marvellous, modernist Picasso style window, centuries ahead of the modernist movement.

The international day of: Insert Name Here

International days are a fine idea, international days celebrating something are a great idea, international days castigating or berating something or someone? Less of a great idea.

In truth, days where something is berated rather than celebrated tend to be on a national rather than international level, examples including Denmark’s annual ‘the-Goons-weren’t-actually-that-funny’ day, Argentina’s annual ‘No! to broccoli’ day and of course our very own forthcoming national ‘I do not fully understand Alternative Voting, but I don’t like it. Is it European?’ day (May 5th). Indeed just about the only international day of condemnation is: ‘is it just me, or is ‘Black Swan’ a bit over-rated?’ day (37 countries signed up so far (on Facebook at least) and counting).

As a species, we like to celebrate things. It brings us closer as a community, and by a community I of course mean as a collection of people who like a drink. That’s the great thing about The World, everyone in it likes a drink; I don’t care if you are in the desert or at the Poles, somebody somewhere will find a way to ferment their way to a fun time and invent a national beverage, even if it means adding clear spirit normally used to clean your snowmobile spark plugs to reindeer piss (known locally as a ‘vodka Red Nose’).

Of course, for real disagreements you have to go ultra local. Look, the fact that an individual can be undecided about something as simple as the purchase of a pair of purple socks (Don’t! the scarf was a mistake, let’s not compound things), essentially having an argument with themselves means that humans can have an argument at, basically, the cellular level. This is what allows two rational people to have a falling out about who’s turn it is to load the dishwasher and share the same bed while still seething with principles (but, importantly, not stabbing one another with cutlery…well, not until it’s clean).

Siblings and spouses can argue, as can villages; a few years ago there was a case of keen competition between two neighbouring villages for the regional title of ‘Britain in Bloom’. One morning, the villages of Little Twatting (or whatever) came out to find their blooms blighted. Skulduggery was suspected and, although nothing was ever proved, the subsequent success of Great Twatting (or whatever) coupled with the fact that the B&Q at Great Twatting (or whatever) had totally sold out of weedkiller the week before cast rather a shadow over what had, up until then, been a rather jolly affair.

Organised fun is no fun at all. Just look at ‘The Wicker Man’. That’s why the calendar if stuffed with Saints days and feast days and other forgotten religious festivals, mostly observed by only the most pious and an increasingly bitter clergy, who want their flock to understand the message of St Fistima (feast day 17th March, message: Romans have no sense of humour whatsoever about their gods).

If you want to have your local, regional, national or international day observed and celebrated, you’ve got to have a gimmick. You don’t even need alcohol, although it helps. You can mark a day of celebration with a pancake, or chasing a fast cheese down a steep slope (and if that doesn’t mark St John’s day, it should). It also helps if you can get the card and confectionary markets on side. In my more heretical moments I often wonder of Christianity was a scam cooked up by Cadbury’s and Hallmark to shift some product at an otherwise quiet time of year. And the initial launch went so well they decided to repeat the whole thing in a few months later and call it Easter. Proof positive will come when they announce that in addition to his birth and death, the church have decided to mark that other important rite of passage in a bloke’s life and that henceforth, 17 September shall be ‘Christ’s First Pint’ day.

It’s good to celebrate something positive. It was world book day this week and I celebrated the world flavour of this by reading a Chinese book. Untranslated. Didn’t understand a bloody word (pictogram, whatever) but I rather hope that somewhere in Liang Shang Po province some farmer stopped killing snakes in his paddy field long enough to read a P G Wodehouse short story, also untranslated…but then laugh half way down page two anyway. Some things really are universal and cross the language divide, and your valet disproving of your choice of cravat is one of them.

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.

Blowing hot and cold

Spent a couple of days last week doing medical research. More precisely, how many sachets of Lemsip do you have to drink before you start to feel a bit ‘odd’? The answer is three. I’m not sure if it was the vile bug I was struck down with or the remedy that did the most harm, but it was a great excuse to lie on the sofa and watch daytime telly.

Which was crap. The only decent thing on was the news channel, which made me want to laugh and rant in equal measures.

Laugh because of the continuing donations scandal enveloping the labour party like a cloud of fart-gas in a lift. So, you’ receive donations laundered through a third party from an anonymous donor? Nothing wrong with that then. How stupid are these people? As it was, the funds came from some dodgy developer but might just as easily have come from somebody who makes his money selling DVDs of gnome porn or something. Best of all, the donations were for £500, £900 that sort of amount. Sorry? You are willing to compromise your career by accepting a donation that would just about buy you an iMac? How stupid are you?

Ranting because of the teacher who was banged up by a bunch of wankers in the Sudan. The charge was naming a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. Her real crime was probably educating kids to the resentment of their parents who think that if a life of grinding ignorance and poverty is good enough for them, then it’s good enough for their kids. I see today that after meeting a couple of Muslim peers, the tech has been pardoned.

I really hope the meeting went something like this ‘Hello Mr President…pick an envelope, you can choose the one labelled ‘iron’, ‘bronze’ or ‘stone’. Whichever one you pick is the age we’re going to bomb your country back into if you don’t release that woman right now.’

Personally, I think they should bomb the place anyway as soon as she’s home.

Fast and loose

With the advent of Ramadan, a notice was put on the work intranet today about ‘joining the sponsored fast’.

I’ve always thought that fasting was, at best, morally repugnant. I can’t see how anyone can think that it’s appropriate to go without food in order to prove their spirituality while there are people starving to death from want. If fasting brings you closer to God, then the Pope should come from Darfur, surely the holiest country in the world?

And sponsoring it? Are you kidding me? Giving people money to stop eating? Actually it’s not a bad idea, they should launch the policy outside the Krispy Kreme stand at the station. Probably be a waste of time though, the sort of fatties that eat there think that ‘fast’ is how they move when threatened with salad.

I don’t think there’s a God, but whenever I’m faced with the prospect of people doing things in his name, I always think it would probably make him cringe with embarrassment. Cathedrals? Lovely. Choirs? Great? But starving yourself? Fasting is just another form of flagellation The only difference is that at the end of it you rush for the fridge not the TCP and bandages and that nobody ever masturbated themselves to the point of delirium while watching videos of people not eating.

Could it be magic?

What image does the phrase ‘papal audience’ conjure for you? Possibly you have an image of some Francis Bacon type pope sitting on a throne in a room lit by flickering firelight and intrigue, with plenty of gothic woodwork for scheming cardinals to hide behind, while you, slightly off your tits from incense inhalation, do ring kissing and ask that he use his influence to shave you a couple of years off your time in hell. Or have your views been coloured by too many ‘an audience with…’ tee vee specials, and you expect a few anecdotes and finishing on a song?

For the parents of Madeleine ‘Maddie*’ Macann, it meant standing with the crowd, waiting until the ex-nazi in question shuffled down the line to them and then a few words and the blessing of a picture of their missing daughter. On the one hand, the ‘tapas two’ must be feeling pretty grim, on the other hand - think what that picture will fetch on eBay.

I’m not sure exactly what the audience with the Pope was meant to achieve. My only thought was, if you wanted to understand the mind of a paedophile, you’d do a lot worse than speaking to a bloke who runs an organisation chock-full of them. It’s a bit like Clarice Starling going to see Hannibal Lector in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ to gain some insight into the mind of a serial killer…and a serial overactor in the form of Anthony Hopkins.

The Pope apparently blessed a picture of the little girl. What this is supposed to achieve I’m not sure - it smacks of sympathetic magic straight out of the dark ages. If they are resorting to that, are they also visiting a voodoo priest who is jamming nails into the photofit of the suspected abductor?

* The family are at pains to call the little girl by her full name, the tab tabbie tabloids prefer to use the abbreviated form - possibly because they can save space to put it in bigger print, possibly because they can save space to advertise their ‘save three tokens and get a free can of lager’ promotion. Probably because they realise that their readers will only hear family members addressed by their full names on rare occasions - christenings, weddings and court appearances. For funerals the shortened version is preferred, as it’s far more economical to have a wreath spelling out ‘nan’ than ‘beloved grandmother’.