The True Meaning of Christmas

I’ve been helping my eldest with his homework: a project on Christmas around the world.

Now, there are no doubt people out there – not ODHSNM readers, of course – who would find this outrageous.

Not me helping my son with his homework. The “around the world” bit. The true meaning of Christmas, they declare, can’t be reduced to some multicultural, relativistic blah blah blah...  - a line of argument which you know full well will inevitably end in someone blurting out the word “Immigrants!”

The true meaning of Christmas, they will say, is...erm...

Well, dear readers, let me put this to you. Christmas is just a celebration of good stuff at a crappy time of year. It has had all sorts of stuff superimposed on it over the centuries, but at the end of the day that’s what it started out as and that’s what it still is.

Don’t give me all that “it’s the birth of Jesus” malarkey. Christ is a late addition to Christmas.

He’s been stuck on top of at least two sets of pre-Christian traditions.

Pagan dessert

Firstly, the Northern European pagan Yule celebrations around the winter solstice. That’s where you get your holly and ivy, your Druidic mistletoe, your Christmas trees, your Yule log (chocolate or otherwise) and all those other Germano-Celto-Scandinavian accessories.

Not one of those things – except perhaps a log – would have been found in the Iron Age Middle East, so have clearly come from somewhere other than the Jesus story.

The second source is Greco-Roman paganism, specifically the festival of Saturnalia.

Saturnalia (Kronoia for the Greeks among us) was a month long celebration of the good old days before that bastard Zeus cursed mankind with the need to work for a living. It involved:

• Gift giving
• Eating and drinking to excess
• A general end-of-term, office party kind of vibe all round, when slaves were afforded freedoms usually denied them and the bosses made fools of themselves

Sounds Christmassy, doesn’t it?

There are loads of other hypotheses kicking about saying that the Christian myth is based on other bits of

Not real

ancient lore, but why get into all that? It’s like arguing about whether Tolkien’s orcs were green or grey. Even if there’s a right answer, it doesn’t matter what it is because it’s ALL MADE UP.

The point is – and I’ll go out on a limb here – it is completely impossible to extract a “true” Christian core or indeed a “true” pagan core. It’s a big syncretic mess of bits and bobs appropriated from here, there and everywhere.

Look at Santa Claus. Where does he fit in? Don’t try to tell me that he’s “really” Saint Nicholas, the fourth century Turkish bishop and early Christian martyr. What the hell would he be doing with reindeer and elves? He’s as obviously mashed up as Baron Samedi.

Balls

Why do you think the Puritans banned Christmas in 1647 as “a popish festival with no biblical justification”? Precisely because they could see how pagan it all was. At least Oliver Cromwell had the balls to recognise it for what it was instead of whinging about the corruption of the “real” meaning on Radio Four.

You can’t select certain bits and say that’s the “real” Christmas and the rest of it isn’t – the Christian bits, the non-Christian bits, whatever. Every step along the way contributed to getting us where we are today. Who can say where taking any of them out would have taken us? There is no distinction between the signal and the noise.

The materialistic aspects of Christmas are just as ancient as the spiritual aspects.

And if we accept that consumerism is our current religion (or substitute for it), then a 50 year tradition of buy-buy-buy from Black Thursday to the January Sales is getting on for half the age of all “ye olde traditions” the Victorians bequeathed us.

It’s as silly to worship a tree or indeed money as it is to worship a big old beardy sky-fairy.  If you pick away rationally at every part of the Christmas myth, eventually you’re left with nothing but a bloody long winter ahead of us.

Maybe we don’t need to have a justification for having a party. The weather’s shit, it’s dark all the time – don’t we have a right to cheer ourselves up?

Perhaps THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the true meaning of Christmas. 

Reading Homer

Homer, not Uncle Albert

In my last post, I referred to “the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn”. Some of you may be surprised to hear that I didn’t make that phrase up.

It is, in fact, an epithet used repeatedly by the Greek poet Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Pretty much every time he mentions the dawn - which is a lot – it’s waggling its rosy fingers.

Anyway, these books are kind of a big deal. They are, I hear, a central part of the Western literary canon.

And as we all know, the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan war and the Odyssey tells the story of Ulysses’ (the translations I read were all Romanised) return from Troy.

Or do they?

In fact, the Iliad tells a very small part of the Trojan war. It doesn’t include:

Just good ol' war buddies

1. The beginning
2. The end
3. The bit everyone knows with the Trojan Horse

Essentially, it tells the story of Achilles acting like a dick because Agamemnon acted like a dick, until his boyfriend Patroclus gets killed and then Achilles kills everyone.

Not included, again, is the bit about Achilles getting killed by tearing a ligament or whatever.

In fact, what we primarily have is to pad out the above is:

• Exhaustive descriptions of various Greeks’ and Trojans’ ancestry;
• Followed more or less immediately by exhaustive descriptions of how those sorry descendents died horribly.

If I learned one thing from the Iliad, it is that there are far more ways to fuck someone up badly with a spear than I had ever imagined.

For example:

The spear struck Archelochus, son of Antenor, for heaven counselled his destruction; it struck him where the head springs from the neck at the top joint of the spine, and severed both the tendons at the back of the head. His head, mouth, and nostrils reached the ground long before his legs and knees could do so.

Thereon Polypoetes, mighty son of Pirithous, hit Damasus with a spear upon his cheek-pieced helmet. The helmet did not protect him, for the point of the spear went through it, and broke the bone, so that the brain inside was scattered about, and he died fighting.

Menelaus hit Pisander as he was coming towards him, on the forehead, just at the rise of his nose; the bones cracked and his two gore-bedrabbled eyes fell by his feet in the dust.

And so on.

So that’s the Iliad. Think you know the Odyssey?

Think again. Far from focusing on the well-known, exciting parts of Ulysses’ voyages (eg encounters with the Cyclops, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, lashing himself to the mast to listen to the Sirens), these are all dealt with in one flashback.

About 70% of the Odyssey is taken up with the frankly rather weird situation going on with his wife Penelope and 115 “suitors” who have been having a three-year long bender round at Ulysses’ in his absence.

So an awful lot of the Odyssey concerns not, in fact, what you and I might call “an odyssey” – but rather:

1. Ulysses pretending to be an aged tramp and talking to a pig herder
2. Ulysses pretending to be an aged tramp hanging around the party, getting abused (someone throws a hoof at him!)
3. Ulysses continuing to pretend to be an aged tramp long after anyone normal would have said “I’m not really an aged tramp – I am, in fact, the king and I am not happy with all this”

Eventually, of course, the “aged tramp” routine wears as thin for Ulysses as it did for everyone else several books earlier and – as is the way of Greek epic poetry – it all ends happily ever after with a massive bloodbath.

On balance, I preferred the Iliad. 

Waking up early

One of my kids is an early riser. And that means we are all early risers now.

Young Tancred (3) never knowingly misses welcoming in the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn, with a hearty slam of his bedroom door.

And that’s just a metaphor, because at this time of year “dawn” in the sense of “sunrise” comes approximately half an hour after I leave the house to go to work.

People of England: one compelling reason to hope for, pray for  – hell, even campaign for – Scottish independence is that the only people who actually want the clocks to go back in October would no longer be our fellow citizens.

The 200 or so sheep farmers (and ten to fifteen remaining milkmen) for whose benefit the remaining 60 million of us spend the best part of six months only seeing natural daylight at weekends would be someone else’s problem.

Anyway, back to our youngest.

Usually and non-metaphorically, he’s welcoming that obscure 5.30am to 5.45am slot, during which he:

1. Wakes up;
2. Has a big shit and then;
3. Decides it’s time everyone else – principally (although not exclusively) his elder brother, Roger Jr – was awake too.

Even if I sleep through or pretend to sleep through the initial barrage, I can rest assured that I will soon be woken by one grassing the other up for something or other, or someone needing their arse wiping. My favourite way to start the day. 

Roger Jr and Tancred are very different characters. While Roger Jr is eager to please and (as a corollary) fairly obedient, Tancred is a thoroughgoing anti-authoritarian anarchist. He obeys no law but himself. Nietzsche would be proud of him. Nietzsche, frankly, is welcome to him.

Every night, we pack him off to bed with a reminder that he’s to stay in his room until his clock tells him it’s morning, that he’s not to wake Roger Jr up, that he’s to stay quiet etc. And he goes along with it.

But come the morning, he does whatever he damn well feels like. Which 9 times out of 10 is to disregard the instructions he was given the evening before and go to play “jumping off the bed” or “hammering the floor with a shoe” or whatever else it is he and his brother get up to most mornings.

To be quite honest, this is starting to wear a little thin. Reasoning with a three-year old is difficult at the best of times. Reasoning with a three-year old sociopath is something else.

Your suggestions, dear readers, would be welcome.

Right now, all I can think of is to wait until he’s a teenager. And then wake HIM up EVERY MORNING.

FOR EVER. 

Russell Brand has my vote

You may have noticed Russell Brand being in the news a bit this week: not for his shagging or drug exploits or even for offending the delicate, but for saying that he doesn’t vote.

That derives from this, an article he wrote for the New Statesman – which he was guest editing this week.

Quite what it means to get a celebrity to “guest edit” a magazine, I don’t really know. How many crap contributions were spiked by Russell Brand? Did he give the advertising department a hard time for a lack of renewals? I suppose we’ll never know.

Anyway, over the course of 4,500 words, Russell Brand (celebrities are always to be referred to by their full names – that’s in the ODHSNM style guide. The editor would have a fit if I didn’t follow it) says this:

I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box.

He also says:

Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve.

This has caused an eruption of ruffled pomposity from the political and media establishment this week – whose response to Russell Brand’s unauthorised trespass into their exclusive domain has been akin to the expression on the face of a wood pigeon that has just fallen out of a tree.

It is best summed up by the tired spectacle of that sneering symbol of everything that is loathsome and exclusive about the establishment, Jeremy Paxman, calling him a “trivial man” on Newsnight – followed by columnist after columnist commenting on this and then on each other’s comments, like a dog eating its own shit, sicking it up, and then eating it again.  

The argument appears to be that Russell Brand is not entitled to express an opinion on politics because he chooses not to vote, despite having a reasoned explanation as to why this is. Maybe Russell Brand's explanation can shed some light on why millions of other people don't vote - or is that an impossibility because he's a Hollywood celebrity? I'd suggest that he has more in common with those non-voters than anyone playing the Westminster game. 

Russell Brand is a witty man who expresses himself well, while also annoying people and being a monstrous show-off. Who else was like that? Socrates was a lot like that. You could argue that Jesus was a lot like that.

CLEARLY I AM NOT COMPARING RUSSELL BRAND TO JESUS OR SOCRATES. Come on, this isn’t the Daily Telegraph comments section.

You don’t have to agree with his point of view (Russell Brand even points out later in the article – YES, I DID read it all – that he acknowledges that apathy also comes from laziness and the inability to care about distant things) but he deserves a hearing. That’s what’s different between today and back then. 

Equally ridiculous looking

Russell Brand may not be the best person to explode the political/media/business cabal, but so what if what he says resonates with people? Paxman trivialises himself once again by playing the man not the ball. His persona and schtick is just as absurd as Russell Brand's. 

Plus, this is not a new point of view. Here’s HG Wells, 100 years ago talking about Parliament.

So far representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair trial. So far we have not had representative government, but only a devastating caricature. 

Politicians are: 

Not really the elected representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party system and the ballot-box 

Criticising the electoral system, HG Wells (the celebrity, not the conference centre) says 

The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of political organisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidently demanded. The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged. Save as they speak for us, the people are dumb. 

Echoing Russell Brand, HG Wells goes on: 

Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. 

Last quote, I promise: 

Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only in theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies so eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their form and substance. 

Perhaps HG Wells was a “trivial man” too. He did, after all, write science fiction novels, thought bicycles were the future of warfare and was a prominent “useful idiot” for Lenin.  

Oops - now we can't take him seriously on anything

Perhaps I am a trivial man too. Almost certainly I am. 

And I'd much rather be one than the sort of creature a Paxman takes seriously. 

My point is simply that there has been a tradition of dissatisfaction with the (still) prevailing political orthodoxy that goes is more than a hundred years old. That critique is not new, nor is it something that establishment has a right to reject out of hand because a “celebrity” is putting it forward. 

You shouldn’t have to be nothing but “serious” to be taken seriously. Politics is not the sole domain of people who have never thought about or done anything other than politics. 

The meaning of “democracy” is not exhausted by the Westminster farce and the media wankers who tell you what you can think about it. Russell Brand has reached his own conclusions – so can you. It's as much ours as it is theirs. 

London – Not as bad as expected

A few weeks ago, I scoffed at the thought of going to London during the Olympics. And right now, I am on my way home after having done so.

Like most people whose sole window on reality is what they see on TV and read on the internet, I had expected something resembling all-day Tokyo rush hour supervised by the Army with corporate blackshirts snatching anyone who looked out of place through secret doors - an early glimpse of the UK’s inevitable descent into dystopian, totalitarian nightmare.  

However, it wasn’t like that at all. It was much like any other day in London. That’s not saying much, but it certainly wasn’t 1984.

To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed not to see a single missile launcher or have to dive out of the way of a speeding dignitary in a Zil Lane. Indeed, the number of people in tracksuits I saw was no higher than a typical day’s viewing in Leeds.

I even saw a little shop with a set of Olympic rings in the window. I took a picture – no doubt scaring the shit out of the owner, taking me for a LOCOG goon – but I thought twice about sticking it on here. Let it never be said that Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind. is a snitch. Bloggers and social media are already doing more than their fair share of turning the whole populace against the idea of freedom of speech.

Well, here’s my own little marketing ambush:

If you like the London 2012 Olympic Games, give me some of your money.

If you don’t hear from me again, assume I have been disappeared into the back of a migraine-inducing purple van.

From my experience today - apart from the splashes of lurid magenta besmeared across everything -  you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole event was actually being produced on a sound stage at Pinewood or in Pixar’s studios and that the entire idea of the Olympics actually “taking place” in London was some elaborate Baudrillardian joke.

While controversy surrounding the Games has focused on the cost and the restrictions on Londoners’ freedoms, for me there are some major issues that have not been given due attention:

1. Barbarians are allowed to take part – this is in clear breach of the Olympic spirit. Was their Greek even tested?

2. Competitors are also not naked

3. Total lack of chariot-based events

4. No oxen were sacrificed at all during the opening ceremony. Like myself, the gods are likely to have found Trevor Nelson’s commentary a poor substitute

Seriously LOCOG, Zeus is a volatile deity at the best of times. 

He has “enforcement officers” of his own, and I’d hate to see Paul McCartney get struck by lightning.  

Top ten unfinished blog ideas

It is well-known that even the crappiest article with “top ten” in the headline will be ridiculously over-rated by Google, and therefore attract way more visitors than the content legitimately deserves.

To that end, here is my very own contribution to the entirely unnecessary top ten genre. Like a ruminant, I’m bringing these half-digested ideas back up from one of my many stomachs for a last chew. Too rambling for a Facebook status update, too under-developed for an entire post –here we go, my Xmas gift to you:

1. All the thrill of the escalator

Does anyone else still get a frisson of big city excitement when they go on a “down” escalator? None of the towns I lived in up until the age of 18 had any shops with a down – it was lifts or stairs only for us yokels.

Every time I ride the down escalator, part of me wants to sing “New York, New York”.

2. Now or then?

Is this London St Pancras 2011 or Berlin Templehof 1936? Fascist art is alive and well...

3, Everyone’s a critic

Has anyone here read “The Communist Manifesto”? I did recently, and I was surprised by how clear and modern Marx’s critique of capitalism is. His descriptions of the finance-driven economy are shockingly prescient of the situation we find ourselves in now.

The second half of The Communist Manifesto is also pretty funny, where Marx kick starts the favourite pastime of every leftwinger ever since and slags off every other kind of socialist who has any point of disagreement with him. Because it’s SCIENCE after all.

And does anyone here like Nietzsche? As far as I can see, his demolition of the foundations of Judaeo-Christian ethics in “Beyond Good and Evil” and “The Antichrist” is irrefutable.

The trouble is, both Marx and Nietzsche go on from their brilliantly-argued critique to erect some batshit alternative scheme on top of it – in Marx’s case, communism; in Nietzsche’s case...errr...well, I’m still not entirely sure. Something to do with “act like a Homeric Greek and don’t give a toss about what anyone else does”.

And the funny thing is, both of those two explicitly denigrate “mere critics”. Why is it so easy to knock things down and so hard to produce alternatives?

4. Don’t put your daughter on the internet Mrs Worthington

If you put a picture of your kids as your Facebook profile picture, no one is going to know if you are who they think you are.  

5. Literary heroics (a)

Thanks to Anonymous (for god’s sake people – just put in any old name when you leave a comment...) for pointing me in the direction of Xenophon. I read the whole of “Anabasis” while on jury duty.

“Anabasis” is the ancient Greek “Bravo Two Zero”. Secret mission in Iraq goes wrong, escape from behind enemy lines, fighting all the way – sound familiar? ANCIENT GREECE IS NOT BORING!

6. Literary Heroics (b)

Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooo lives in a pineapple under the sea? FRIDTJOF NANSEN!

If Xenophon is Andy McNab, Fridtjof Nansen is Bear Grylls – but without the overnight hotels. I just read “Farthest North”, relating his polar expedition of 1893 to 1896. That’s right – three years in a wooden ship on the Arctic Ocean.  

In fairness, there are times when the repetitive prose manages to not only describe the ball-aching boredom he suffered being frozen into pack ice with 13 Norwegians waiting to drift to Greenland but also to elicit it. I could only care so much about what they had for dinner EVERY DAY FOR THREE YEARS. "Took the latitude. We have drifted 12 feet north in the last week. Took a sounding. The sea is very deep. It's been night for six months. Thought I saw a polar bear, but I didn't. I am so bored."

But the unbelievable fortitude of the man – a man of action, and of science and (later) a humanitarian statesman - is just inspiring. Sure, there are plenty of British polar explorers I could have idolised. But their books were not free! Nor did any of them have quite such an impressive moustache and stare. 

7. Vests are not outerwear

It is not acceptable to wear just a vest in public in the UK if you are a man. Even if it’s hot.  Especially when it’s cold.

Also, is it wrong that when I hear the line “don we now our gay apparel” in “Deck the halls with boughs of holly” I can’t help but think of assless chaps?

8. The most revolting cocktail ever

I give you the “Scotti”.  

9. The day I quit the gym

I cancelled my gym membership – and had to work out a three month notice period @£72 a month! Outrageous. If anyone has any ideas on how I can avoid turning into Jabba the Hutt, I’d be most grateful for your input.

10. And then the abyss stared back into me

The trouble with writing a blog is that when I meet people in the real world, I don’t have anything left to say to them. In telling every interesting anecdote I have on here, and polishing and grinding down the sharp edges on the facts until it becomes a routine or a bit of schtick, I lose the will to ever mention it again. 

Go George Go

For what it is worth, Greek prime minister George Papandreou can count on the support of this blog in his efforts to inject a little democracy into the EU’s attempt to set an all-time record for throwing good money after bad.

As Seumas Milne says in the Guardian today:

It makes no sense. Unless it's understood that it's not the Greek economy that's being rescued, but European and US banks exposed to Greek debt.

Perhaps my economically-literate blogger friend Existential Doubt could offer some elucidation as to exactly where all this money is going and how it’s going to help?

Money has to be continually poured into Greece so Greece can give it to the financiers, who will stop lending money to governments that spend vastly more than they collect in taxes if they ever lose out, resulting in the collapse of social democratic welfare statist civilisation as we know it - which is only possible when states borrow huge amounts of cash with no idea about how to pay it back from financiers. That about right?

So, am I being naive or missing some obvious point if I can't help but see this as simply delaying the inevitable and impoverishing yourself in the process?

As Kenny Rogers would say:

You've got to know when to hold 'em - and know when to fold 'em.

Anyway, that's enough economics. Here's some politics.

Papandreou offers the Greek people a referendum on whether they want to return to the kind of economic and political colonisation by foreign powers that they spent most of last 500 years trying to shake off, and suddenly, he’s an irresponsible, weak lunatic because - god forbid! - if they are given a say in the matter, the people might decide that they would rather that the banks lose some money than be reduced to eating grass to survive for the next 50 years.

You can question the democratic credentials of a prime minister of Greece whose father was prime minister of Greece and whose grandfather was also...errr...prime minister of Greece. But he seems to have remembered that democratic politicians are there, when it comes to a moment like this, to serve the interests of their people first rather than international capital. 

This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.

That’s Article A of the Treaty of Rome, which led to the creation of the European Union. I wonder what went wrong...

The magic of e-reading

Do you remember that there was once a time when you didn't have a mobile phone, and no one else you knew did?

So if you wanted to get in touch, you'd have to (i) remember their phone number and (ii) call their house to see if they were in? Or alternatively – and even more outlandishly – you'd have to (i) remember where they live and (ii) drop by to see if they were in.

How on earth did we get by wasting so much time? Walk round to someone's house! The very idea of it.

It's very odd how mobile phones, laptops, social media, iPods etc etc have all insinuated their way into our lives subtly and irreplaceably, to the point where we take them completely for granted.

They start appearing and you think: "That's ridiculous – I never needed [whatever the gadget does] before. Why would I need that now?" Before you know it, you get panicky if you can't check Facebook while you're on the toilet. The medium is the message, innit?

So I must report unto you – my readers – then, that I am now the owner of an Amazon Kindle (thanks to all the Sicilies for my Father's Day present!) And having been sceptical about them before, experience suggests that I should approach this new bit of technology in my life with the innocent openness to having one's mind changed of a new boy turning up for his first day at Pyongyang Central Penitentiary College of FE.

Having lugged a hardback copy of "Against the Day" (1,085 pages) around with me for the months it took me to read (TWICE), I am already feeling the benefit in terms of improved posture.

However, the Kindle is affecting my habits in other ways. It is changing what I read – for the simple reason that there are hundreds of great books out there (many of them here) that are FREE.

Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't pick up a second-hand copy of Herodotus' "The Histories" for any price. On the one hand, it would take up too many of the sparse cubic feet in my tiny house. On the other, if it was shit, I would feel obliged to read it to the end because I'd paid for it.

I know what you're thinking. No, not "oh god, he's talking about Greeks again – I thought this was going to a funny one or an angry one". What you are thinking is Herodotus' work would probably not have survived the last 2,600 years and become a central part of the Western literary canon if it had been shit.

Well, believe me – despite the lure of "The Histories" being effectively the novelisation of 300, I would not have stuck with old Herodotus past that endless description of "how big various things in Egypt are" in the second book if it hadn't been free. And I am probably a more enlightened person for doing so. My bag is certainly enlightened. BOOM BOOM.

It still hurts me mentally to think that I gave up reading "On the Road" TWICE because it was so awful after paying full price for a brand new copy. And that was about 17 years ago.

But now, I can pick up books by a whole host of authors and give up on them if they're a load of old crap like Kerouac, because they didn't cost me a penny! In your face, economics of publishing! And in your face, self-imposed obsessive-compulsive rules of behaviour!

So, if you like sci-fi and you haven't read HG Wells or Jules Verne – stop paying money for new books and read the foundations of the freaking genre for nothing. If you like horror, Arthur Machen and HP Lovecraft. If you like crime, Conan Doyle. And you needn't spend a penny. Well, if you already have an e-reader that is.

Plus, it's better than the library, because (i) you don't have to remember to take anything back, (ii) it's likely to exist for more than a couple of years to come, and (iii) best of all - it's not full of smelly vagrants and weirdos!

Asphodel Field journal

The ancient Greek underworld had three main areas: the Elysian Fields, Tartarus and the Asphodel Fields.

The first two correspond roughly to the Christian concepts of heaven and hell – although admission to the former was more achieved on the basis of heroism than virtue, while the latter was reserved less for the evil than for those who had simply pissed the gods off.

On that, the Greek gods do have a certain compelling appeal. Rather than having to perform logical and verbal contortions to explain how an all-powerful, all-good god allows the world to be such a bloody awful place for most people, most of the time, the Greeks had simply to declare that their gods were a bunch of spoiled arseholes and have done.

Indeed, with its sexual incontinence, all-consuming egocentricity, tendency for random violence and a general attitude reminiscent of an over-tired toddler, the Greek pantheon was a lot less like the Christian god than a bunch of Premiership footballers.

Having three principal zones, the Greek underworld was mathematically 25 per cent less good than The Crystal Maze then, but 50 per cent better than the Judaeo-Christian afterlife.

"Hang on," I hear you say: "What about Limbo?"

To which I'd reply, no thanks it's a bit early in the morning and my back still hurts. PARP PARP.

Well, rather than turn to centuries of theological discussion on this point, I'd simply refer to Wikipedia, which says:

1. Limbo (and Purgatory, before anyone else starts on that) are sub-parts of hell.

2. Limbo is not an officially doctrinally recognised part of any Christian tradition.

Plus, I'm only saying it's not as good as The Crystal Maze.

Obviously, only when Richard O'Brien was running it. For all that "Swords of a Thousand Men" was a fine record, Ed Tudor-Pole was neither a patch on O'Brien, nor was his maze 50 per cent better than the whole heaven-hell combo.

Anyway, you may recall that some time ago, I mentioned the Asphodel Fields – the third and indeed largest part of the Greek underworld.

Before we return to it, another slight digression. The Greek underworld was commonly held to be accessible to mortals via caves and tunnels. Go into the cave, down the tunnel – there's the River Styx, Cerberus, Sisyphus pushing his rock up a hill and all the other familiar stuff of legend.

Now, I accept that the Greeks lacked our sense of scientific falsifiability, but it's hard to imagine that the following conversation (or one like it) never took place:

First Greek: "I hear you went down that tunnel to the Underworld."

Second Greek: "Yeah."

First Greek: "Was the Underworld there then?"

Second Greek: "Well, I didn't find it."

They should then, of course, have concluded that the Underworld was not in fact there. Although I expect – faith playing a typical part in leading people to deny the evidence of their senses and their sense – that they concluded it must, in fact, have been down a different hole.

Greeks, of course, were famed for having long arguments – although the course they took and the conclusions they reached rarely resembled anything you or I would regard as probable. That is, none of the works of Plato relate a tired and emotional Thrasymachus calling Socrates a knobhead and smashing him over the head with an amphora.

It has long been an ambition of mine to rewrite the works of Plato, so that Socrates' interlocutors respond with slightly fewer leading questions and less arse-kissing, and treat the insufferable tit with the degree of patience he deserves. For example, from Book 4 of "The Republic":

Socrates: Let us suppose that philosophical minds always love knowledge of a sort which shows them the eternal nature not varying from generation and corruption.

Glaucon: Not this again.

Socrates: And further, I said, let us agree that they are lovers of all true being; there is no part whether greater or less, or more or less honourable, which they are willing to renounce; as we said before of the lover and the man of ambition.

Glaucon: If you say so.

Socrates: And if they are to be what we were describing, is there not another quality which they should also possess?

Glaucon: I'm sure you're about to tell me.

Socrates: Truthfulness: they will never intentionally receive into their mind falsehood, which is their detestation, and they will love the truth.

Glaucon: Shall we go to the pub? Maybe there will be some hot vestal virgins in.

Socrates: 'Maybe' is not the word; say rather 'must be affirmed:' for he whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections.

Glaucon: What?

Socrates: And is there anything more akin to wisdom than truth?

Glaucon: I'm going now. See you tomorrow.

Socrates: Can the same nature be a lover of wisdom and a lover of falsehood?

Glaucon: (from afar)....Bye!

Back to the Asphodel Fields – pictured here in the imagination of Stuckist Elsa Dax – which, I'm sorry to say, is where most of us are heading if Greek eschatology is correct.

This part of the Underworld is set aside for those who lead unremarkable lives, neither good nor bad – those of whom (in one of my favourite quotes) Thoreau says:

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

The Asphodel Fields are just like real life, only more boring and rubbish. No one quite remembers who they were before, and they just aimlessly wander around like nutters in a giant bus station. For us moderns, I expect it would resemble an endless out-of-town retail park, when all the shops are closed...

So that, dear friends, is the ancient Greeks' message to us and we'd do well to remember it: you are going to be bored forever unless you live a life that is heroic or which really pisses the gods off. If you're really unlucky, you might even end up stuck talking to Socrates for eternity.