Juvenilia, Part 4

Happy chocolate egg-themed spring fertility/rebirth event everyone!

To celebrate the seasonal cycle caused by the tilting of the earth on its axis as it orbits the sun, which our ancestors symbolised as the death and resurrection of the natural world - which in turn has been metaphorically embodied over time in the various figures of Ishtar, Horus, Mithras, Dionysus and of course Attis (who chopped off his own cock and balls) - here is a photo of me when I was five years old, delighted on a trip to the zoo at seeing a seagull.

I don’t want to spend too much of your time poking fun at the self-appointed culture warriors whining about the removal of the word “easter”from egg hunts – which didn’t even happen – but it is particularly ironic that the derivation of the very word in question comes from the pagan festival of Eostre... 

Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that nothing is "pure" and everything is the product of syncretism. Which makes a lot of people either insincere or idiots. 

Anyway, on the subject of idiocy...

Going through my old school books again, I came across this story “The Nutter” – illuminated with the author’s own illustrations, in the manner of William Blake - which I would like to submit for analysis in its entirety.

Are you bored of this yet? Well I don’t care.

“The Nutter” concerns a boy named Terry, who we are told is very “dim and stupid”. The story relates the less-than-hilarious consequences of (i) Terry being given a budgie (ie he loses it) and (ii) Terry buying a model battleship (ie he loses that as well).

The only thing I can really see that Terry does wrong in the story is taking the budgie home on top of his head. His mother’s suggestion – that the correct way to carry a bird is “in a paper bag” – sounds, if anything, worse.

When he buys the battleship and puts it in a bag in his pocket, but nevertheless, loses the bits when they drop out, this just sounds like bad luck. However, his mum decrees “no more pocket money for you”.

I particularly enjoyed the epilogue – “so Terry could not go out and make a mess again”.

On reflection, I think this piece tells us not only about attitudes towards mental health in the early 1980s, but it also leads us astray. We are all Terry. The real “Nutter” is of course Terry’s mum, who thinks birds should be transported in paper bags, which is even for the imagination of a 7-year-old, stupid.

Anyway, the teacher – as you can see – thought it was “very good”.

Juvenilia, Part 3

I was born on January 30^th 1976. This is how the Southend and District News Observer chose to celebrate the auspicious occasion – with ads for exhaust pipes, a “slimming programme that really works” and ...erm....a luxury sauna and massage club. Which is almost certainly NOT a brothel. Probably. If you read the ad closely, you will be delighted to hear that "Penthouse" boasted such facilities as a "colour TV". 

Sadly, my parents did not save copies of any national newspapers from the day of my birth – just this local classified section. However, extensive research (by which I mean a couple of minutes on Google) shows that the only event of global significance occurring on my date of birth was the appointment of George H W Bush as the 11^th director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Working on the Dalai Lama principle for that date, I could have been the reincarnation of EITHER Texan blues musician Mance Lipscomb or Percy Tyson "Plum" Lewis, a South African cricketer, both of whom died on the day I was born - my arrival on this plane thereby providing a suitable vessel for their immortal souls. Whether this would have been a karmic promotion or relegation for either of them, it's hard to say. 

However, when Tibetan monks presented my infant self with items that had belonged to Messrs Lipscomb and Lewis I failed to recognise them, causing me to be disqualified from the succession. One of my earliest memories is the monks’ heartfelt frustration over the wasted journey they had undertaken from Lhasa to Essex.

Speaking of lamas - this works better if you read it out loud, of course - here is a picture of me and my brother (far left) being conveyed around London Zoo by one of the popular South American camelids in 1981 or 1982 #nofilter #swag #llama

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. 

You can wear what you like

When I see politicians calling for debate about banning burqas, I have to agree with this bloke – there’s nothing to debate, because this is Britain and people can wear what the hell they like.

The ostensible reason that this tiresome old chestnut has been hauled out of the fire once again is that some judge has said a Muslim woman can’t enter a plea in court wearing a veil on the grounds that her identity could not be verified without seeing her face.

As usual, the accompanying media hoo-ha is not actually about the legal arguments involved. Though not a lawyer myself, I am not aware of any legal precedent saying that people in court have to be identified facially. We have such marvels of the 19^th century as “finger-prints”, for example, which I am told many judges are these days inclined to accept as real evidence when imprisoning people, let alone confirming who they are.

I live in West Yorkshire so most days I see at least one fully-veiled person. I can say with some confidence that it is a rare day on which they are the most remarkably-attired person I will see. It bothers me no more than when I see a Sikh man wearing a turban, a Jewish man with ringlets or a student dressing like a ridiculous clown.

That’s nothing to do with being PC or “culturally sensitive”. I believe that it is a matter of being true to “proper British values” (whatever they are) to not give a toss what anyone else wears, thinks or does unless or until it impinges on others.

Sumptuary laws were one of the first things to be dumped in the move from feudalism here in the West, so it is staggering to me that anyone would think of bringing them back today.

As a motorcyclist, I cover my face in public places a lot. This should not lead anyone to regard me as a security risk or a source of suspicion.

I accept that when I go into private places – like petrol stations – the “terms of use” of that place often require me to take my crash helmet off. If I don’t like it I can buy petrol somewhere else where they have different rules.

I do not accept, however, that when I am in a public place I should have to prove anything to anyone by verifying my identity by means of showing my face, presenting my papers or scanning a barcode tattooed onto my forehead.

I am a citizen and the source of law and political authority in a democracy is the citizenry. The state is there for our convenience and protection, not the other way round. The law is there to protect citizens from each other AND FROM THE STATE, not the other way round. A woman with a bit of cloth over her nose and mouth poses no threat to me or you by virtue of having a bit of cloth over her nose and mouth. If she thinks it’s important, that trumps your aesthetic preferences or what is easier for you to deal with. End of.

Only one of these is a burqa

There is, of course, the argument that women are being coerced into wearing veils by the actions of men, supported by cultural norms within the relevant communities.

But banning veils doesn’t tackle that problem. It’s the equivalent of treating pneumonia with cough medicine – addressing an outward symptom only.

If you think that someone else’s culture is “wrong” about something like the treatment of women, then confront that point directly – not through some ridiculous sublimated proxy like banning items of clothing.

I suspect, indeed, that forcing women to remove their veils in public is unlikely to do much to promote the cause of feminism amongst outraged men who impose it on their wives and daughters because they think it is sacrilegious. It will just alienate them from the law and convince them that it regards Islam as an enemy.

And I suppose that the idea that “Islam is our enemy” is really what is at the bottom of a lot of this; that burqa-banning is a way for Islamophobes to indulge their prejudices while pretending that they are promoting some sort of liberal values.

What people wear is none of the state’s business and none of the law’s business, no matter what their religion, their gender or their race. 

It’s (not) Christmas (any more)!

Christmas is now but a distant memory, with only a cupboard full of unwanted chocolate and ever-greater discomfort around the waist to remind us it was ever here.  

Lots of amusing things happen over Christmas, don’t they? And yet because we’re “away from our desks” over the period and because once we’re back at them Christmas is the last thing anyone wants to think about, we rarely get an opportunity to dissect them.

Well, fret no more! ODHSNM once again strides out where the mainstream media fears to tread and features a Christmas-focused article in mid January.

Much like Tulisa, One Direction and other glitzy celebs, the Pope tossed off a book for Xmas this festive season.

And "The Infancy Narratives - Jesus of Nazareth” did not disappoint with its no-holds-barred, warts-and-all, nothing-left-to-the-imagination account of how the Christmas story is not actually true.

You sit on a throne of lies

It may come as rather a shock to you to hear this coming from His Holiness Benedict XVI – accustomed as we are during December to driving past empty-looking churches festooned with passive-aggressive posters insisting “if it wasn’t for Jesus you wouldn’t have ANY Christmas”.

Particularly in the light of the various absurd articles of faith the Holy Father has not yet seen fit to debunk.

But if Jesus was not actually born on December 25, then what is stopping us from having a staggered Christmas season?

Not that sort of staggering, you cheeky monkey you.

No, why can’t we just choose when to celebrate it? For example, shortly after the January sales? Everyone doing it at once is highly inefficient. It creates queues, allows businesses to ramp up prices, makes us all take a really quiet week in the office as leave etc. Plus the weather is always shit.

If we’re all getting the date wrong anyway (and I refer you to the Pastor aeternus of 1870 – the bit on Papal infallibility), Jesus would presumably not mind if we all got it wrong on some other, more convenient date of our choosing.

I told you this year’s theme was going to be calendar reform. We’re starting early.

Speaking of “starting early” one of the best things about Christmas is the expectation that you will – nay, obligation to – drink alcohol during the (admittedly scanty) hours of daylight.

WHY?

Not only that, but you are entitled to drink things that you would never consider drinking at any other time – such as advocaat, sherry or banana liqueur.  Or indeed red-coloured paint thinner with clove oil in it, also known as “mulled wine” at this time of year.

Nothing quite beats the feeling of settling down in a chair thinking “it’s 3pm, I’m hammered, I may well fall asleep and nobody is going to give me a hard time about it”.

And if it wasn’t for Jesus, you wouldn’t be allowed to do that so you really should go to church to make it up to him. He looks a bit annoyed.

But really, Christmas is a time for the kids (and if it wasn’t for Jesus, you wouldn’t have any kids).

What I really want to know is, when did it become necessary to have a set of wire cutters about your person when sitting down to open kids’ presents?

I have seen nuclear reactors less comprehensively sealed and 50-storey buildings less securely anchored than most of the things our boys got this year.

A plastic horse we got for Tancred (retail value, I dunno, about £5?) was (i) in a cardboard box that was (ii) taped shut inside and out and then (iii) attached to the packaging by tightly-wound wires around each foot and its tail.

The whole thing is completely crime-proof unless you...oh, I don’t know...STEAL THE BOX AS WELL.

As it was, my finger ends were bleeding raw by lunchtime from repeated attempts to separate box and plastic lump. 

Jesus really doesn’t like all that packaging. He’s tutting and pursing his lips right now.

But if you look round at him, he’ll pretend to be doing something else. 

Is there anything, readership, you would like to share about Christmas? Perhaps you bought ten lighters for a euro and some batteries at an English market in Germany? Or maybe you wonder why the official canon of Christmas songs ends at around 1986? Let's have your amusing observations below. 

What's another year?

T-4: I see that many other media outlets are picking up on the Mayan apocalypse pencilled in for this Friday. Well, here at ODHSNM we have been on it for the whole damn year.

“What’s another year?” quoth Johnny Logan in 1980’s Eurovision winner.

Well, Johnny, a “year” is a bloody awkward rough approximation of the duration of the earth's orbit around the sun. And a proper pain in the arse it is too.

("Another year" refers to the second or subsequent instance in a series of years. And that is what another year is.)

I am attempting to plan my evil capitalist schemes for 2013 (it’s best to be prepared, in case we’re still here) and I am faced with the following absurdities:

• A year, in the Gregorian scheme, is 365 97/400 days (5 hours, 49 minutes) – that is the time between vernal equinoxes. Hence we have leap years every four years unless....eeeurgh it’s too hard, read it yourself.
• Quite independently of years, we have weeks comprised of seven days each – five of which we work and two of which we don’t.
• You do not have a whole number of weeks in year whether it’s a normal 365 day year or a leap 366 day year. Months have between 28 and 31 days, or between 18 and 23 working days depending on where the weekends and bank holidays fall.
• This makes it very hard to project ANYTHING month on month or indeed year on year with any degree of accuracy - because you are hardly ever comparing like and like. 

Now, I realise that calendar reform has got in with a bad crowd – it immediately suggests Year Zero and Pol Pot. And I think it’s fair to say that no one really wants to be associated with that.

I recently read “The World Set Free” by HG Wells.

Now, I know what many of you are thinking.

The Ogilvy Theatre

Most of you are thinking “that’s a conference centre in Woking”.

And, yes, it is – but I am talking about the writer, after whom the conference centre is named.

Some of the rest of you are thinking “hold on... apart from all the Good science fiction stuff, wasn’t all of HG Wells’ political and social thought Bad?”

Well, old Wellsy certainly doesn't make too many bones about how much better his future utopia would be without the poor, the stupid, the uncivilised and the uncultured in it – and he is not in favour of what we in the business world would call “achieving cuts by natural wastage”.

Nevertheless, almost in passing, he suggests that the year should be split in 13 months of four weeks each – with Easter as an annual intercalary day and leap years as specified by Pope Gregory XIII.  

Gregory would have approved. Probably. 

I think this is a tremendous idea and one not necessarily dependent on any kind of genocide or mass slaughter. 

It would make us all marginally younger and it would make the whole maths of time a lot easier. 

Who will join me in my quest for a rational year?

The End is Very Nigh

Give it up for your X Factor finalists

T-11: It’s nearly upon us, apocalypse-watchers. Less than two weeks until the end of the world, according to some dead Mexican astronomers.  

It seems that after a year of nothing very apocalyptic happening, people are finally starting to get their acts together and behave like cattle in a lightning storm.

However, I must admit to you all, that since Christopher Maloney did not win The X Factor last night, my conviction that the world’s doom is imminently upon us has been seriously shaken.

All of a sudden, the arguments put forward by NASA and others against anything out of the ordinary happening next Friday seem fairly convincing.

The Mayans are all dead, and apparently they didn’t know about the extra quarter-day in the solar cycle which makes Leap Years necessary. Taking those into account would mean the world had already ended.  

It’s the Final Countdown

Have you seen this god?

T-55: Not long to go now, eh apocalypse watchers?

Less than eight weeks to go until the end of the world/the dawning of a new age of spiritual enlightenment/the Strictly Come Dancing final, depending on your point of view.

For my own part, I have to say that the portents have been a little disappointing to say the least. Jimmy Savile obviously came as a surprise, but apart from that the last few months have been pretty slim on Book of Revelation-type stuff. 

I am starting to wonder if this is all not a big joke. Has anyone else seen anything suggesting the impending end of days? Let's try to keep it light-hearted though. 

Haunting the chapel

I’ve just been robbed by Henry VIII.

Yes, Britain’s favourite wife-killing fatso has cost me about £20 or so 550 years AFTER his death.

“How?”, you may well ask – unless you are already asking “Are you having a psychotic episode, Roger?”

Well, let me tell you – because the erstwhile Tudor monarch could well be reaching out his chubby phantom fingers from beyond the grave to lighten your pockets also if you try to buy a house.

The merrie maniac

Henry VIII, you may recall, was responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries. Much like our present-day rulers, he wanted to grab hold of a load of cash and give some of it to his chums and spend the rest of it on war.

To cut a long story short, when this happened the Church’s liabilities for the repair of church buildings passed to the new owners – which were then generally dumped on the local starving, struggling populace in the form of tithes.

Still with me?

Tithes were then gradually abolished over the following few hundred years.

OR WERE THEY?

Turns out, no one is quite sure if certain bits of land across the country are in fact still liable to pay for repairs to church buildings in whose parishes they may happen to be. The records are sketchy.

In 2003, a couple were charged £100,000 for repairs to an ancient chapel on a farm they had inherited.  The good old House of Lords decided that the Human Rights Act didn’t apply – which is surprising considering how many of its members have undoubtedly inherited ancient chapels.

And so, we return to the present day and the preposterous Chancel Repair Liability Search – for which I have just paid my own tithe, on top of all the other pointless costs on which I have already bent your ears. Eyes. Whatever – sense organs generally. I’m fairly sure I haven’t touched anyone about it.

As I said before, records in this area are sketchy. It’s not clear, even if you check all the available paperwork, whether the property you are buying is potentially liable.

With the same enervating uncertainty as Ant and Dec telling an unpopular celebrity that “it might be you” who has to face the Bushtucker trial (but less than half the charm), Chancel Repair Liability Searches can only tell you that you “might be” liable for a whopping great bill at some unspecified point in the future.

And on what grounds? On the production of some tattered scrap of paper found in the crypt of some OTHER church, which says you are.

That is, if the institution which stands to benefit from finding such evidence digs out documentation which was available only to itself. Now that’s justice.

And so, whither goest risk, hither cometh the insurance industry. You can insure yourself against the danger that you might be financially fucked forever by a law that you not only didn’t know applied to you, but which you couldn’t know applied.

In 2008, the government refused to do anything about this Kafka-esque state of affairs. Its reply to an online petition said:

Chancel Repair Liability has existed for several centuries and the Government has no plans to abolish it or to introduce a scheme for its redemption.  

The Government acknowledges that the existence of a liability for chancel repair will, like any other legal obligation, affect the value of the property in question, but in many cases this effect can be mitigated by relatively inexpensive insurance. It is for the parties involved in a transaction to decide whether or not to take out insurance.

And so the demands of the past over the present are sanctified by the availability of insurance.

Perhaps legal anomalies of this sort are just the price we pay for our “living” constitution – the appendix or coccyx of the body politic.

Indeed, we have many thousands of apparently humorously quaint and charming laws, some 800 of which the Law Commission is looking to get rid of later this year.

Isn’t it delightful that we live in a land where you can technically be pilloried for not tethering your goat correctly on St Swithin’s Day?

No it isn’t – and here, the drummer out of Blur explains why. As he says:

There is no such thing as "technically" being a criminal

Let me paraphrase (and draw perhaps slightly stronger conclusions than a Labour candidate might endorse): these laws put power into the hands of the state which may subsequently be used to suppress activities you had no idea were illegal.

That a person can be criminally liable for something he or she had no idea was illegal and which has never consistently before been treated as illegal is the essence of injustice.

The persistence of these ancient laws is a merkin for the arbitrary exercise of state power – they are the Patriot Act hiding on the village green.

Yeah, it’s only £20 – but it’s the principle of the thing, innit. 

Your Racist Friend

In the course of my work, I have to read and pretend to enjoy lots of extremely tiresome articles about social media, how freakin wonderful it is and how it can transform your business.

Apparently, it’s not enough for businesses to just sell things any more. They have to be part of your life as well. I suppose that stems from the Great God Google itself – which like the Christian God not only demands that you obey It on pain of damnation, but that you love It as well.

Much more entertaining are the articles about social media in the mainstream press – for example, this hilariously ill-informed piece from the Daily Mail, which claims that the mass-copyright-infinging-picture-collecting-social-network-for-girls Pinterest is in fact named after Harold Pinter.

I’ve been trying to get back into Twitter (not under the @RogerofSicily name, which I’ve pretty much abandoned – in spite of all the attractive but down-on-their-luck young ladies looking for love that I’ve never met before who have kindly decided to follow me), but it seems to me either like shouting into the void, standing next to some strangers having a conversation while smiling, nodding and trying to force your way in, or just doing email in public.

I do a bit of professional social media on Linkedin, under my real name - which, if you learn it, gives you the power to summon and command me (or at least to email me). But mostly I do social media on Facebook.

Which brings me on to the needlessly provocative and They Might Be Giants-referencing headline of this post.

The social media article I am waiting for is the one that tells you the right way to deal with connections who treat their social media presence as a way to carry across what Members of Parliament would politely and pompously call “saloon bar” language and attitudes into the public sphere.

There are things we might all say in private to shock, amuse or just to be transgressive for the hell of it – which we would nevertheless not say in public or to people we were not intimately familiar with and who we trusted. I will not deny saying things that are offensive or awful to get a laugh or just to be obtuse. In fact, I did such a thing last night (while watching Crufts of all things...) and Elvira bollocked me for it, because I had indeed crossed the line where shocking-good becomes shocking-bad.

Everyone does it but at the same time, everyone has a level at which they too would say “that’s out of order”.

So my question is, how should you respond to social media acquaintances who broadcast “jokes” or comments that you find offensive? They’re not speaking directly to you – or are they? They are inviting your response.

“Unfriend them”, you will say. Done that. Is that enough though? Is it enough to just walk away without saying anything?

You may think this is unduly pious, but as well as the standards of human interaction and mutual respect which I proclaim and attempt to uphold, I’m thinking of my own arse here. The Great God Google and – indeed – the security services suck up all this data (for our own good, of course).

People have lost their jobs and even been sent to prison for things they have said on social media. How long would it be before my online presence became guilty by association for having sat by and “tolerated” this?

PS – I couldn’t think of a suitable picture to go with this post, so I followed general internet protocol and put a picture of a cute animal on instead. 

The power of muesli

Along with quiche, salad and tofu, muesli is frequently portrayed as a food that is inherently effeminate and in some way shameful for real men to eat.

Well, I have been eating muesli for breakfast since the New Year (it’s T-325, in case you regard this as another harbinger of the apocalypse) and let me tell you: in the immortal words of Discharge, muesli ain’t no feeble bastard.

The Full English satisfies more, but it leaves one greasy, crapulent and feeling guilty. Fruit and yoghurt...come on. People only eat that (i) in hotels and (ii) for the sake of appearances.

Muesli alone has the power to keep me from feeling hungry until lunchtime without making me want to go back to bed. It is a freaking miracle food.

So why has it become so closely associated with bed-wetters and Liberal Democrats? Maybe it’s the Swiss thing.

So the story goes, muesli was invented in 1900 by Swiss doctor Maximillian Bircher-Benner to feed to the patients in his hospital, after he had been fed something similar by a mystical mountain-dwelling peasant on a hike in the Alps.

We like to think – don’t we? – of the Swiss as a bunch of effete bankers and diplomats, concerned solely with manufacturing clockwork devices and helping criminals avoid taxation.

And yet, this is a nation of hard-ass do-it-yourself mothers who:

1. Have seen off pretty much every challenger to their political and religious independence (apart from Napoleon) since the 14^th century.
2. Created the first ever democratic multilingual and multiethnic state.
3. Were, for much of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the go-to mercenaries for anyone wanting their enemies crushed underfoot, impaled on sea of pikes or chopped to pieces with a halberd. They were the goddam Chechens of the time.

And look at them now. Sat in the middle of a collapsing Europe, winding their cuckoo clocks, eating their Toblerones and telling the rest of the world it’s too poor to come in.

THAT is the nation that gave the world muesli. So mock my breakfast at your peril. 

The Second Seal is Opened

T-343: Isn’t it warm for January? Usually, West Yorkshire is frozen under an inch-thick carapace of ice at this time of year. COINCIDENCE? I don’t think so.

Well, if this is the end of the world, I must say it’s preferable to another winter of (i) being unable to drive up or down our road and (ii) having to walk everywhere very carefully, looking like I’ve bobbed meself.

I've not spotted any other portents of the end times, bar the unusually mild weather. 

I did see a seven-headed beast rise from out of the sea the other day. But when I thought about it later I realised it was a seagull trying to lift a plastic bag out of the canal. 

Dooooooh!!!

Mayan Apocalypse Liveblog

T-350: According to the Mayans, the world is going to end later this year. Specifically, on December 21 – so we will at least get to watch the Olympics first.

And so, as this final year progresses, I will be the first to you know about all the portents of doom as they happen, right up until the big moment when the planet is destroyed. At that point, I will hand over to the aliens, evolved dolphins or whatever that humanity will be passing the baton on to.

Either that, or I will turn to any remaining Mayans at that time and describe to you the look of intense embarrassment on their faces when it turns out that the conclusion of a 5,125 calendar year cycle since the date of their creation myth means nothing at all.

And when that happens, I will have very little to tell you – because there aren’t any Mayans to speak of and haven’t been for some hundreds of years, they having notably failed to predict the collapse of their own civilisation in the 10^th century.

Still, that major omission notwithstanding, I plan on taking the idea that the earth will crash into an as-yet completely undetected planet called “Nibiru” on a specific date later this year – despite the entire balance of astronomical evidence being against this hypothesis – 100 per cent seriously, and I will keep you updated accordingly. Only 350 days to go!

The Czech is in the post – pt 2

Here’s the second instalment of my guide to Prague for people who share the exact circumstances my wife and I found ourselves in last week. For everyone else, there’s always Tripadvisor.

Czech Language

This is probably historically a highly tasteless remark, for which I apologise in advance - but Prague is basically a German city inhabited by people who speak a language that bears no resemblance to German.

Everything I saw pointed to either Vienna (if it was less than 400 years old) or that whole kind of Brothers Grimm medieval Germany thing (if older).

Anyway, as well as excellent English and German, the Czechs speak a language called “Czech”, and this is a Slavic language. As such – and again I apologise for any cultural insensitivity here – it is a lot like most other Slavic languages, from Russian, to Polish, to Serbian and so on.  For example, the Czechs say “dobra den” and the Poles say “dzien dobry”. PotAYto, PotARto – DUMPling, DIMPling.

Mercifully, the Catholics got to the Czechs before old Cyril and Methodius, and they use our Roman alphabet.

However, this is of little advantage when your find yourself confronted with repeated storms of consecutive consonants, which really do not lend themselves to English tonguing. Elvira and I struggled to ask for “Trdelnik” when we found it, and ended up rendering it like Dora the Explorer saying “turtleneck”.

And here I must insert a little linguistic rant of wider relevance. English has its faults, but it makes do perfectly well with 26 letters. If you need all those goddam accents to cover all the sounds your language makes – perhaps you need some more letters. I’m just sayin’ is all.

Anyway, I can only begin to imagine how Czechs play Scrabble. They are not, however, above a bit of Engrish.

Czech Money

The Czechs are not members of the Eurozone, which means that you can still have loads of fun wondering what the hell is going on with a currency you cannot get your head round - which in turn means that your holiday descends into a purgatory of near-constant mental arithmetic.

Their money is called the “koruna” and £1 is worth anywhere between 25 and 31 of them – which makes for very confusing “value for money” assessments when shopping.

Here’s a piece of useful advice (by my own low, low standards). Get your koruna in the Czech Republic, not in the UK. You get a much better rate (worst case, +3 more koruna to the pound) and you will not be slapped around the face for waving euros around, at least in the vicinity of the airport and Prague itself. Unless, I suppose, you are being met by Vaclav Klaus, who doesn’t like euros. But nor does he drive a taxi.

 

As well as suitcase-hostile block paving/cobblestones, the streets of Prague are lined with exchange booths, in which tourists swap their home currency for ever-fluctuating korunas.

To your left, you can see an example of Czech language, Czech money and German economic colonialism all in one place.

And that, dear readers, brings me on to a little adventure the missus and I had...

So there we were, standing outside an exchange booth trying to work out whether “we buy” means that they buy pounds off you for that many korunas or they buy that many korunas for a pound, when a man sidles up to us and starts asking if we’re interested in changing money.

Now, this chap spoke good English with that kind of accent which, to UK ears, could place him anywhere from Strasbourg to the Urals. He looked kind of Kazakh, or something else Central Asian. Anyway, he said that he’d give us 32 koruna to the pound – which was the best deal we’d seen.

My suspicions were first raised when he insisted on carrying out the transaction behind a parked car. But I wasn’t too alarmed – he’s probably just trying to dodge tax, I thought, and that is in both our interests... I wasn't going to hold that against him. 

So I say I want to change £100. He suggests £200. I say I’ve only got £100. So he whips out a bundle of notes, and counts through them at Paul Daniels speed – one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, one hundred, two hundred. He has my £100 in his hand when I realise that I have actually seen a one thousand koruna note, and the notes at the bottom of his pile are a different colour. And size. And they had “Hungarian forints” written on them.

Like a panther, I grab my money back, rebutting his protestations that they are real banknotes by declaring - I was very proud of this particular bit of wit - “I can read”. And away we go, very pleased not to have been ripped off. Later on that day, I checked the exchange rates and found that 1000 forints were going for about £2.79.

Elvira was deeply impressed by my display of shrewdness. All I can say is that the deep suspicion and cynicism about other people that condemns me to a life of perpetual isolation sometimes has its upsides.

Coming next...Czech Technology and Culture. For real, this time. 

Remember, remember what actually happened

The demand that x, y or z "should be banned" is regularly heard these days – generally directed at things or ways of behaving that the demander personally doesn't like.

No matter how liberal, libertarian or laissez-faire an individual is most of the time, pick on something they subjectively object to and you can generally rely on the fascist within to surface and call for the coercive power of the state to be thrown behind the removal of other people's freedoms to do, be or have something they disapprove of.

So it is not without some trepidation and discomfort that I ask "why in god's name doesn't the government ban the public sale of fireworks?"

From now until around early December, every night is Bonfire Night for someone. As soon as it gets dark until around 11pm, someone somewhere within earshot of your house is going to be setting off small incendiary bombs for their own amusement without regard to the welfare of you, your kids, your pets, farm animals etc etc.

No doubt some of them will be maimed or killed – as they are every year – and a load of buildings will be burned down, either by stupidity or intentional malice or the combination of both that appears to be the hallmark of 21st century Britain.

It seems crazy to me that, when pretty much every other way of behaving anti-socially or self-destructively is on the Nanny State's agenda for eradication, the selling of explosives to children and drunks for use in their own homes is not higher up the list.

At the moment though, it's not just fireworks that are dragging out the whole Bonfire Night misery over an ever-growing stretch of the year. Disaffected middle class people the world over seem to have adopted the image of Guy Fawkes from the film V for Vendetta as in some way symbolic of their tiresome festival/holiday/protests against capitalism.

Never mind that every V mask purchased profits Time Warner (Dow Jones – TWX; current market capitalisation - around $35 billion; preferred economic system – capitalism). Guy Fawkes is a pretty crap symbol of anti-authoritarianism.

When he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I in 1605, Fawkes and his pals were emphatically NOT doing it in the name of democracy, freedom, socialism, organic wind farms or anything else that our protesting friends would believe in.

He was, in fact, trying to kill a Protestant king in order to put a Catholic monarch on the throne. I've got nothing against Catholics TODAY, but the experience of sectarian strife under the last two explicitly Catholic British monarchs – Mary and James II – suggests this would have led to the destruction of any nascent democratic stirrings in a torrent of blood and burning heretics.

That's not to say, of course, that the Protestant royals of the time were any less inclined towards violent repression on religious grounds. The main problem, I reckon, was perhaps more that back then rulers felt that political power implied a right to slaughter not only anyone who didn't DO what they wanted them to do, but also didn't THINK what they wanted them to think.

Nevertheless, I think if you look at the history of Protestant countries and Catholic countries in Europe from the 1600s onwards, it seems reasonable to conclude that the former ended up rather more liberal and democratic a lot more quickly than the latter. That's just what happened in history, innit?

Anyway - in the same way that pseudo radicals are content to forget that dear old Che Guevara ordered the execution of civilians because he looks good on a T shirt, only someone who didn't really have a clue what Guy Fawkes was trying to achieve would adopt him as a democratic icon. 

Goats and penguins

So, I just read an hilarious article by Marina Hyde in the Guardian, which suggested that – amongst other things - the role of England football captain was "marginally less important than that of a regimental goat".

I like goats. They have a lot of personality (for ungulates), but they seem unfairly to be tarred with the "Satanic" brush – dating back at least as far as the New Testament:

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left." 

Meaning that all goats go to hell – presumably because they're stubborn and wilful rather than good little followers. Well, I'd rather see a goat standing on a roof than watch a flock of sheep herded into a pen any day of the week – and if that puts me among the Damned, so be it.

The great thing about the internet is that it gives you a guidebook for when your mind is wandering. So, having sniggered at the comparison of John Terry to a regimental goat my capricious (GOAT LIKE) brain asked itself where the tradition of goats in the military came from. And Google and Wikipedia, like over-indulgent parents who cannot deny anything no matter how stupid or inappropriate to their little darlings, duly led me here to William Windsor the goat, lance corporal in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

You MUST read the article because it's utterly hysterical – the story of the goat's demotion being just one highlight.

The previous William Windsor was demoted to fusilier in 2006 after being court-martialled on charges of "unacceptable behaviour", "lack of decorum" and "disobeying a direct order" at the Queen's 80^th birthday celebrations in 2006.

That meant that the rank and file no longer had to stand to attention when he walked past. He was subsequently reinstated after three months, regaining his membership of the corporals' mess - much to the chagrin, no doubt, of the various humans who had been seeking promotion. 

The latest William Windsor the goat (appointed 2009) is still in training, and only has the rank of fusilier. As part of his package, he gets two cigarettes a day to eat – although he is too young as yet for his ration of Guinness.

But if you thought that was tapping gently at the window of insanity, you have presumably never heard of Colonel-in-Chief Sir Nils Olav of the Norwegian Kings Guard. Who is a penguin, resident at Edinburgh Zoo.

In 2008, accompanied by 130 members of his guard, King Harald V of Norway went to the zoo to knight the Antarctic seabird, whom he described as:

"In every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood".

Of course he is your majesty. And have you remembered to take your special tablets today?

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.