Happy Christmas

All the best to each and every one of you. You atheists, Christians, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and all the other myriad tones of humanity. I wish you all well.

Miche & I enjoy Christmas in the same way we do other annual events like Halloween, Guy Fawkes, birthdays and wedding anniversaries - they're each a reason to celebrate connection and being together.

So, let me raise a glass to you, my blog friends, to wish you a Happy Christmas.

So much to say and so little time to do so...

In the meantime, here's one of my favourite tracks this week. Perhaps you'll enjoy it.

Wolf Parade, I'll believe in anything

Shrooms

St Therese

In what circumstance, other than in the name of God, could dragging the decayed remains of a consumptive 24 year old woman around the UK be considered socially acceptable?

A shin bone and some from her feet will be taken to 28 sites over the coming months. Those that have arranged this macabre spectacle are expecting large crowds, as her remains allegedly promote "healing and reconciliation".

St Therese's potent posthumus power was harnessed seven years ago, when her patella, phalanges and left thigh were brough to Baghdad to prevent the Iraq conflict. To good effect, of course.

It does make one wonder. It really does...

Still very much alive

I haven't died. Neither have I stopped blogging. You could say that life has been a bit mental of late. Also, my camera is broken, which means I'm reduced to cellphone crappery and this is not funny.

Thankfully, I'm on holiday for a fortnight. We split last week between the beloved little cottage on the hill and our new caravan. This was nice. Next week, I shall be mostly camping with the kids whilst mother rests at home.

I can feel the urge to blog ripening ready for my return. So do bear with me, dear reader.

Glorious

Pretty much the perfect weekend.

The bleating of an old man

It’s the pope’s fault that I’m slowly turning into my father – old curmudgeon that he is.

You see, the grand wizard pontiff warned Muslim leaders recently not to misuse religion for political means. Which was a bit rich, to say the least. Before I knew it, I was shouting at the telly again.

I mean really, when has the Catholic Church ever restricted its meddling? Given the slightest chance, it interferes in all manner of things. Take their ‘loving and omnipotent’ god for a start, who, despite being responsible for our entire universe, would still like to micro-manage your sex life.

Only as a tactic of retreat has the Church ever attempted to restrict its interference. As it continues its inexorable decline into irrelevance for the vast majority of us, many factions of the church have retreated into the unfalsifiable territory of ‘Spirituality’ and become nothing more than a pathetic foe to the relentless force of rationality, science and human learning.

Yet the pope still pontificates upon morality like it’s his God given right to do so. Seriously, it boils my piss.

When it comes to the moral teachings of Christianity, or any religion for that matter, they are largely uncontroversial because almost any moral system must find a place for their tenets: Do to others as you would have them do to you, try to be honest, peaceful and considerate whenever you can.

Moral content peculiar to religion however, is invariably perverse, twisted and bizarre. Perhaps they are of their time – a one of violence, pestilence and poverty. Nevertheless, I struggle to understand why considering the Cormorant, Lapwing or Weasel unclean conferred any advantage to the faithful.

Religion offers nothing of specific value any more. What it does offer, distinct from other, rational codes of morality is miserable, sick and something we can do without, quite frankly.

Now mother, where did I leave my slippers?

Roadside Porn

It saddens me how risk averse we’ve become as a society. Take cycle helmets for example. When I was a kid, we would rampage around town and country, helmetless and carefree with our hair flowing in the wind. Yes, some of us died from horrific head injuries, but the vast majority of us lived to tell the tale.

Oh how I miss my hair.

When I was eleven or so, I would spend long summer days with Taff, as he was called back then, on account of his Welsh parents, cycling all over town and not one person worried about our lack of protective headgear.

One of these wholesome days became a rite of sexual passage, when we discovered a discarded porno mag beside the road - the first I’d ever seen.

We scampered underneath a nearby motorway bridge to thumb through the rain wizened mag for gentlemen who appreciate jazz. I sat on it each time a car went past.

We giggled at the uncomfortable positions the models made with their “blow up doll” mouths and were secretly grateful for the diffusive power of humour. But my, how those beautiful women stirred me. How they mesmerised me as they stared out from the page right into my eyes - begging me to do things I did not fully understand.

We hid the magazine within a gap in the concrete bridge and made a spit on palm brotherhood pact not to return to the sequestered porno until the next day when we’d bring a bag to smuggle it into our bedrooms. Then went home for tea.

I sat at the dining table that evening cross legged, mind full of sumptuous breasts and underwear. Mother's mince pie no longer held the same attraction as it had. My internal battle to put the thing out of my mind was unbearable.

Ultimately, hormones got the better of me and I found myself pedaling full tilt back to the bridge in the evening sun. Fuck friendship I thought – this is important.

I rode past Taff, the bastard, cycling red faced and breathless in the opposite direction back into town. He even pretended not to see me. The fucker had a back pack on. It was then that I discovered that all’s fair in love, war and masturbation.

Which is another thing to lament. Because of our great, private Internet, there’s no need for paper based filth to be thrown out of car windows any more. I had built up a rather formidable collection of ‘road kill’ in my unconnected youth and regret that young men have lost this healthy incentive to cycle miles in the country.

These days I spend a lot of time running along roads trying to delay middle aged spread and haven’t come across porn for many years. Not that I’m still collecting, you understand. It’s just that I find it a sign of these modern times.

This morning as I ran, I noticed the paucity of jazz as usual, along with the plethora of beer cans, McDonalds and cigarette packs, but also plant pots, oddly. Eight of them in all - dispersed across six miles of roadside. They were each the black, thin plastic ones you get from the garden centre designed to take home your plant before being discarded once you’ve placed it in your border.

When I was old enough to cruise around in cars and throw stuff out of windows nonchalantly, I was more likely to smoke pot than to re-pot my begonias in the back seat.

The youth of today are very odd.

Wankers, you might say.

Crystal Horse

Old demo meme

In the same week that my Father cleared his loft and stumbled across a box of tapes upon which I'd captured my frantic pubescent strummings, an old friend, via myface, sent me a long forgotten demo from the early nineties that we believed at the time would change our lives.

This sent me upon an archivist's quest to digitise all the shite I've created over the years - C90s, Tascam 4 tracks and what not. Just like family photos, old shite appreciates in value over time. Historical significance overtakes artistic merit, you could say.

So, I'm going to post select songs that I've written, in reverse chronological order, from my early twenties to early teens (1980's) here over the next few weeks. Not only to exorcise old demons, but to encourage Atheist Blogroll members to do the same. There's nothing like listening to your old demos for a bit of drunken nostalgia...

So, here's the first song of the demo, funnily enough called Faith.



Be nice, post your own demo and tell us about it. You will be reassured upon listening to this track, that standards can be very much improved upon...

Bits of train

Blasphemy

Any restaurant that puts leaflets on its tables telling customers “How to enjoy” its food has a problem, or at the very least a lack of confidence.

We do enjoy being told what to do of course - filling one’s belly on the tit of authority does sooth the 'soul'. However, stuffing your gut at an all you can eat Taybarn’s buffet is a bleak, soulless affair despite any command to enjoy it.

Now I don’t mean to be a snob, which of course I am, but I did spend Saturday lunch time boggling at obese families shovelling their week’s calorific quota onto a single plate of bloated slop and marvelling at anorexic waifs making confused points of nibbling exclusively on salad leaves at an all you can eat restaurant.

There were ordinary families of course. And if I could be so bold as to count ourselves amongst them, then we might assume that they’d rather not have been noticed.

Not somewhere we’ll be rushing back to.

Anyway, I felt I should run early yesterday morning to take advantage of the empty Easter Sunday roads and burn off the Taybarn calories before girding myself for the considerably more palatable onslaught that is the mother-in-law’s Sunday lunch.

The route took me through the back of the church yard, past the arched main entrance where ordinarily I would scarper at full tilt down the steep path to the main gate.

I didn’t expect to literally run into the vicar who was stood welcoming his congregation to the early Easter service.

He was a pleasant, somewhat eager twenty something – bright eyed and bouncy enough for him to skip aside in his flowing white robe to let me past without a serious collision.

“Shit, Christ! Sorry!” I blurted out.

He didn’t even flinch at my blasphemy and gave me a big, holy smile and said “No problem mate, enjoy your run!”

He had Nike trainers on under his robe.

Nice bloke.

It's funny how you find random things appealing.

Midweek in Cambridge

We've had some rare and quite precious time to ourselves sans kids, so have taken the opportunity to visit places we've always wanted to go.

Whilst Miche is a little disappointed that we "didn't come away from Cambridge with anything", I feel quite the contrary. Not only did I capture this photo, I'm also left with a nagging regret that I'll never be a peer to the great, good and beautiful of the studentry. And on top of that, I now know quite a lot about the anatomy of the hagfish, courtesy of the University Museum of Zoology.

It's a most amazing, primitive creature with four hearts, two brains and eye spots so simple that they provide beautiful evidence of evolution.

Now, back to the grind...

Heaven is real?

I overheard the kids having their first theological debate today. Well, I say debate - if shouting at the top of your lungs and spitting Hovis Best of Both at each other is debate, then that's what they were having.

Dom was offended that his sister didn't believe in heaven, which came as a surprise to me, as we're not raising them heathen any more than we're raising them god fearing. She seems to have come to her own conclusion on the matter. (Neither of them spotted my 'Go Girl!' air punch from the dining room.)

Anyway, the argument went something like this;

"But Meg, heaven is real! It's where you go when you die."

"No it isn't."

"Yes it is."

"No it is NOT!"

"YES IT IS!"

...cut three minutes of tit for tat...

Finally Dom came in with his killer argument for the existence of the afterlife;

"Heaven is pink and has nuts and everything."

"Eh?"

"I know it is, 'cos horses are brown and not green and I've seen horses, so I know. "

I'm feeling rather proud of Dom's nascent logic skills at this point, though what green horses had to to with heaven escaped me.

"Aaaand, I've seen heaven on TV - it's pink and cloudy with nuts. So heaven is real! HA!"

And so I realise that Dom's heaven is from Ice Age 2 where the squirrel dies and goes to his special nutty nirvana in the sky...
Bless 'im.

Too windy for kites

Discovered today that running through snow is rather hard going.

Dirty little parent

My blogging hiatus doesn't mean to say I'm not coming across things that confuse, frustrate or befuddle me. Take this minuted item from our school parents council meeting for example;

A parent has expressed concern that food which is sent in for Christmas parties may not be hygienically prepared in other parents houses and wouldn’t it be better for the children to bring a little packed party tea for themselves for such events or restrict items to crisps and packet cakes.

I say to you, you overly anxious paranoid parent; please, shove your hygienically prepared party food right up your arse...

Out of the mouths of babes

Standing in the school yard this morning Dom asks "Daddy, can we get some cock porn tonight?"

"Ahem, yes I suppose we could pop into Blockbusters on the way home." I replied.

Sniggers and the odd gasp...

Spooner, you have a lot to answer for.

Breaking the Ice

The nearby lake has completely frozen over, much to the delight of our children who, given the opportunity, would scarper right to the middle. Not on yer nelly...


Blogging has now recommenced.