New glasses!

Pretty swish, eh?

"You will look very handsome," said Best Beloved when she heard about them. An interesting choice of tense, I thought.

The last glasses lasted several years, but were just too face-hugging and the arms were leaving welts between my eyes and my ears. Lately they were actively rubbing the skin off and I was spending my days with plasters on my temples, leading to the inevitable concerned enquiries from friends and/or co-workers. The main design spec (ba-boom!) for the replacements was adequate clearance between arms and head.

Five minutes after putting them on I walked into a pillar in Superdrug, but I don't think anyone noticed.

This has been a weekend of image overhaul, as yesterday I also got measured up for my groom's outfit. Usually I detest spending more than five minutes in a clothes shop and I'm no great fan of suits. I always end up growing out of them - vertically while at school, more lately horizontally. I do have a morning suit inherited from the late husband of a friend of my grandmother's, but it's for someone my height and half my diameter. Somehow it seemed worth making that little extra effort for the big day.

Sorry, ladies, no photos as yet. Just trust me that it's a pretty nice black frock coat and stripy trousers, which not only disguises the fact that the figure beneath it isn't worth a second look, but also makes you think that maybe it is. That is quality tailoring, I tell you.

Underneath I was really gentle

On a completely different Germanic theme, I watched the excellent Downfall last night – a reconstruction of the last days in the Fuhrerbunker as the world crumbled around them. The world can be allowed, indeed should be encouraged, to forget Trio; but this – never.

Downfall is one of those films, like Schindler’s List, that should be shown to every generation, preferably often, just to make sure no one forgets. Not so long ago – still in reasonably fresh living memory for many people (ask anyone who lived through the war, even as a child) – there was a time when our European cousins were wearing silly comic opera uniforms, wiping out populations, bringing Gotterdammerung down upon themselves, and, as the noose tightened around Berlin, making life so much easier for the advancing Red Army by shooting, hanging or poisoning everyone within their own ranks who showed a bit of courage, integrity and intelligence.

Unlike Schindler’s List, this one was made by the Germans. Good on them.

Apparently it caused some controversy in Germany by portraying Hitler as ‘normal’. Which is precisely what makes it so chilling. At one point Frau Junge, the young secretary who wrote a memoir on which much of the film is based, turns up late for work because she overslept. She stammers out an apology to the Fuhrer, who gives a knowing, avuncular smile. “Had a little lie down, did you?” he asks genially, and gets on with his dictation. (Of words, not countries.) And you think, ah, what a nice old bloke. And then you scream at yourself, WHAT DID I JUST THINK??

But it did make you think: in the event of there ever being a Channel 4 programme on “The Top 100 Most Evil Nazis”, exactly who was worst?

• Adolf – instinct makes you want to put him at the top, because certainly the whole caboodle could not have happened without him. Whatever the Irvings of the world might say, he knew and approved of the Final Solution all the way. Couldn’t have done any of it, though, if others had said ‘no’.
• Goering – a basic waste of space. Might have ended up as a retired Oberst Blimp, huffing and puffing about his days in the airforce, long since left behind by the technical advances in aerospatial engineering.
• Himmler – may have risen to a highly unpleasant petty little official – a burgomeister somewhere in Bavaria, maybe. Would probably have ended his days a chicken farmer with unusual ideas about polygamy.
• Goebbels ... ah, Goebbels. None of the above would have got anywhere without the mighty machinery of the Nazi party to boost them along. And who created that machinery? Whose propaganda poisoned the climate of an entire nation, letting this vile thing grow to the monstrous proportions it later assumed? Step forward Doctor of Philosophy & Literature Paul Joseph Goebbels, the poison dwarf, a bitter little creature who let his wife drug and poison their six children rather than let them face a future without National Socialism. I think we have our most evil Nazi.
  

A question I bet you very rarely heard in post-war Germany: so, what does your dad do?

Obscure prophecies from scripture no. 4019: Trio

"May those who say to me, 'Aha! Aha!'
turn back because of their shame."
- Psalm 70 v. 3

It may seem a little thin-skinned to complain of people coming up to you and saying "Aha! Aha!" until you remember Trio - the obscurely named trio of German minimalist synth pop artists, whose song "Da Da Da" did just that. This little number, Germany's most annoying musical export since Marlene Dietrich, bored its way up the UK charts in the early 1980s, and thanks to the psalmist it's back in my head again.

For those whose years are still too tender to remember, try a mental exercise. Picture Schwarzenegger putting all his famed acting and emoting skills into the words 'aha aha aha'.

Now imagine him saying 'ich lieb dich nicht du liebst mich nicht'.

And now, 'da da da'.

You have the song.

Quite clearly, the psalmist had a word of prophecy about this dire event some 3000 years in advance. How sad that no one paid any attention.

Possible reasons for this oversight:

• on the great Venn diagram of humanity, the circles of biblical scholars and synth pop fans don't overlap very much.
• we were still reeling from Joe Dolce's 'Shaddup your face' and Jona Lewie's 'Stop the cavalry'.

The latter is a reason, but not an excuse.

Hard sell

At first glance there's nothing unusual about this picture, but then you may not know I live in a second storey flat. Even the Jehovah's Witnesses usually give up after the first 20 feet.

This guy was measuring up the windows for replacement, standing on the last rung of a very long ladder. Okay, there was someone holding it at the bottom, but the best he could have done if his mate had come off would be to cushion the fall. Sheer bloody terrifying. I will dream of falling tonight.

Meanwhile I've just shaken off the latest example of Thames Water's finest to phone me up unsolicitedlike and offer me something I already have or am not eligible for. I'm with the Telephone Preference Service but there's nothing to be done about existing insurers getting in touch, and these ones get in touch more than most. The five second gap between me answering the phone and someone asking for Mr Jeebers is always the clue that it's them.

In this case the non-eligible product was additional cover for the pipes bringing water into the property.

- Her: "Can you confirm you are the owner and the property is not a flat?"

- Me: "I am the owner and the property is a flat."

- Her: "Well, I'm afraid this policy doesn't cover flats - is that all right?"

I'm still not quite sure what happened, but somehow the conversation started as a cold sales call and ended as if I was the one who had made an enquiry.

This is a quaint habit; I'm not sure if it should be encouraged. Directory enquiries could phone up out of the blue and give you the number of a complete stranger that you might want to talk to. There again they might give you the number of a complete git. Car salesmen could visit your house while you sleep and part-exchange your old banger for a decent top of the range model. But you may find they've hauled off your classic MG.

Either way, I draw the line at glaziers suddenly appearing outside my living room window. For that, I would continue to need warning.

Da da-da dum

Am I the only one to think James Blunt's woefully underplayed (snort) "You're beautiful" rips off the opening bars of The Incredible Hulk?

A quick Google search ...

No, apparently I'm not.

Gary Glitter

Watch me not care.

How to write up

Once upon a time, and a mostly good time it was, I worked in a mostly pleasant building called Woodside - a former private home, converted to offices, perched high on a hill above Oxford amidst pleasant gardens and boasting its own pool, which you could even use on those occasions when the boss's PA remembered to get it chlorinated.

My former employer is long departed, I am even longer departed, but the place persists - amongst other things, apparently, as the Thames Business Advice Centre. Now, if you're trying to plug the virtues of an Oxford location, most people would probably emphasise the dreaming spires angle, unparalleled access to large wodges of our national history, thriving cultural scene etc.

Somehow, "only 2 minutes from the Hinksey roundabout on the A34" comes across as faint praise.

So there I was, having tea with three nuns ...

In fact, three blue nuns, though some wear black. Apparently it’s a matter of choice. The blue get to wear a blue-grey robe that actually looks quite comfortable, the black wear the more trad and forbidding Sister Act / Blues Brothers garb beloved of Hollywood. Your peripheral vision tells you an emperor penguin is sidling up to you; then you look more closely and see it’s just a saintly lady of a certain age plus, in a garment that her spiritual ancestors 1000 years ago would have recognised.

The sisters at St Mary’s convent in Wantage have helped Best Beloved get through some hard times in the past, the place has a special place in her heart, and she has repaid the favour by becoming an Associate. The Boy and I went along to watch and support, to see that she didn’t say 'I do' to anything which she might later regret, and to make sure that if there was a form saying 'I want to be [ ] an Associate [ ] a Nun' then she ticked the right box.

So, after the service, a silent lunch and then a friendly chat over the aforementioned tea, with mint matchmakers* broken out to the sound of a delighted little 'ooh!' from one of the sisters involved. Mint matchmakers seem to be the permitted vice of choice, a bit like sherry at the vicarage. It was those matchmakers that gave me an Insight.

If the motivating factors of life are sex, money and power, then the traditional nunly vows of chastity, poverty and obedience are the exact opposite. This means that everything in the life of these sisters is a gift and a blessing. Everything that they do within their community is a gift and a blessing to someone else; everything that is done by one of the other sisters is a gift and a blessing in return.

And though I didn’t press, I got the distinct impression that these sisters haven’t always been sisters, which fits with the tradition of that particular convent. Apparently it was founded in the nineteenth century, when Wantage was known as Black Wantage, the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in the Vale. 'Every other house was a pub,' a nun told me, clearly feeling a mild thrill at the thought of such salacious wickedness. A bright dynamic young clergyman brought in the sisters to clean the place up. Anyone who knows Wantage today can conclude they succeeded.

And that is how these communities should work. Their people live out in the world and learn about it. Then, if they feel so called, they take the veil, or whatever nuns do (veils weren't in evidence) and the convent becomes a huge reservoir of life experience and wisdom, stored like a battery and discharged into the community. Meanwhile, asking nothing and receiving little in return, the nuns go about their daily business content with the odd blessing of a cup of tea and a matchmaker. There are worse philosophies.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––-

* By which I mean chocolate matchmakers flavoured with mint, not matchmakers still in their own original wrapping, which would be silly and spoil the taste.

And so it begins

The new bed was just a shot across the bows. I can no longer pretend my life isn't going to change drastically.

The problem: no shower in bathroom. Contributing factors to the problem: no ready power source for use in the bathroom, and floor level hot water tank, so gravity fed shower not practical unless I lie down in the bath and play shower head along my body. (Which might be fun at first but would soon lose its appeal.)

Motivating factor: Best Beloved wants one. Boy needs one.

The solution: install a power shower! Something I have been putting off for lack of time and/or funds and/or motivation for far too long ...

And so I now have a 10mm electric cable dangling from my bathroom ceiling, next to a dangly switch that wasn't there 24 hours ago either. Follow it back via the trail of ripped off picture rails, holes drilled in walls, slightly wobbly bathroom floor tiles (turned out they were glued down), removed doors, uplifted carpets, replaced floorboards and more holes in walls, and you come to a brand new circuit breaker next to the fuse box. All courtesy of the Magician Electrician, Scotland's greatest export after single malt, a man whom I won't name because I suspect he's moonlighting but who gave up 12 hours of a perfectly good Sunday to do all of the above, and put his marital harmony at risk to ensure my own. What a guy.

Next step: get the shower installed ...

All things considered, I would rather be a plumber than an electrician. Unless it can find a way to seal off your nose and mouth, water has to try very hard to kill you.

The appliance of science

We are a high technology company.

We have very clever doors.

They save lives.

Hold page 7 of the Education supplement!

The Guardian did a fairly decent review of The New World Order yesterday: see http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1713794,00.html. Which is nice.

It's the first time, I think, that I've looked closely at the Guardian since the many years ago when I was desperately trying to find a publishing job outside London - somewhere, anywhere! - and hit on Oxford. In those days (and maybe still?) the Guardian's Monday Creative, Arts & Media section was the place to look. How well I remember my eyes straining against that forbidding utilitarian black type. It must have been the last of the major dailies to grasp the concept of design. Stalin wouldn't have enjoyed the paper's politics, but he would have enjoyed looking at it.

And now it's the visual equivalent of the trendy wine bar. How things change.

Ben: the Unblogged Adventures

It was a secret too big to hide. You can thrill to my exploits, never before recorded, here. I have no idea how the artist found out.

Not just a river in Egypt

Mary Magdalene, David Irving and Mohammed. Watch me weave them together into a seamless whole.

I've recently finished According to Mary by Marianne Fredriksson, a novel of the life of Mary Magdalene from early orphaned childhood to middle age. Jesus is crucified and missing-presumed-ascended; Paul is writing his letters to the Corinthians; Mary, uncomfortably aware of how much the former disciples of Jesus resent her, is lying low in Antioch but is eventually persuaded to write down her memories in what becomes the apocryphal Gospel of Mary. (And in a nice touch of irony, she is also called upon to translate Peter's semi-literate letters into decent Greek, paving the way for their inclusion in scripture too.) The gist of the book is that she and Jesus were lovers and that his revolutionary views on the equality of women were anathema to the male-based followers. By the time Jesus was off the scene, and Peter and Paul were on it, poor Mary didn't have a chance. Cue two thousand years of patriarchal hegemony.

So far, so Da Vinci Code, but better written and based more closely on what we know, however much you may disagree with the conclusions. Which I do. But I will also admit that an oft-repeated quote of Jesus from the Gospel of Mary - "Make no rules of life on this which I have revealed to you; write no laws as the lawmakers do" - does sound like something he would have said. In other words, although I end up where I started - not believing Jesus and Mary had a sexual relationship - I have been sufficiently challenged to work out why I believe this, and thus my faith is strengthened and enriched.

Now, David Irving, right-wing nutter who famously didn't believe the Holocaust happened until a likely jail sentence hove into view and suddenly he discovered some documents that suggested in fact it did. Happen. I may well believe different if I had relatives or friends who had died in the death camps, but I can't help thinking the very fact of denying the Holocaust says all that needs to be said about the speaker. Do you need to bung them into jail too? Because we shouldn't just be taking it on faith that the Holocaust happened. The recent history of the former Yugoslavia shows all too well that new Holocausts can occur all too easily. Every generation needs to study and re-examine the evidence to show that the Holocaust did happen, and to prevent them from slipping into complacency that it could never happen again. And to do that, you need to be able to ask: "did it really happen?" Whereupon you look at the evidence, and you say, "yes, it did." And you are duly warned.

Belief based on blind faith and no evidence, even if it is correct belief, is only correct by accident, and we have no way of knowing that it is correct.

And Mohammed ... yes, it's those cartoons again, which are now claiming Muslim lives as other Muslims go a-rioting. Yes, those cartoons slandered him. So show us how they slandered him. Convince us. Win our minds. Don't just knee-jerk.

Mary Magdalene, David Irving and Mohammed. See how easy that was?

Farewell old friend

Let me tell you about my bed.

My bed's past is shrouded in mystery. We first met when I moved into my flat 14 years ago, and I was sleeping with it almost immediately. You would think that in a 14 year acquaintance with that depth of intimacy, a few secrets would leak out, but somehow it always kept quiet.

What I know, or am about to say, I have pieced together from clues here and there. I'm guessing it probably went to Spain sometime in the 1930s to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. Or quite possibly the other way round - you know how easily beds turn. Come WW2 and it slipped over the Pyrenees to join the Resistance in a spirited guerilla war against the Nazis. Then after WW2 it emigrated to South America where it divided its time between tracking down war criminals and taking it easy as a gaucho on a cattle ranch near Buenos Aires. It fell foul of the junta and had to go underground, where its WW2 experience put it in good stead, before finally making a break for the Falklands. It lived there uneventfully for a few years until the Falklands war, when it successfully tricked the Marines into surrendering on Day 1 to give it cover as it retreated into the interior. There it fell into its old ways again of heroically resisting the invaders, lending such assistance to the SAS as was required before the taskforce arrived.

That brings us to the 1980s. Here it gets hazy. It certainly returned to the UK, and quite probably it was involved in the miners' strike, though I'm not sure on what side, and also the first Gulf War as a final fling. By now quite elderly, it decided to retire to Abingdon, where I enter the story. I have slept on it for most of the nights since 1991.

I mention all this to give an indication of how (a) old, (b) hard and (c) lumpy it had become. Well, no more. Today saw the final parting of our ways, as I took delivery of a brand new super kingsize pocket sprung divan based double bed. It takes up about 25 percent more room but I can live with that. I think I'm in love.

Old bed? What old bed?

It’s like post-punk never 'appened

If I ever became a pop star – quite a big if – I suspect it would be because I enjoyed playing the music, jamming with my mates, generally having a good time. Making a living from it would be nice and winning awards would be gravy. But I could very well do without the Brits. I’d happily turn up to be given my gong and maybe enjoy a decent meal, but I would pay good money not to be serenaded by Paul Weller.

Paul has never sounded like he’s enjoying what he does. Of course, songs like 'Going Underground' and 'Down in a Tube Station' aren’t meant to sound like they’re being enjoyed, and the sheer force of the singer's anger makes them timeless. But that was then and then was a long time ago – Thatcher at her height and a lot to be angry about. There was a point to Paul back then. Why exactly does he continue to be famous? I quote a Brits organiser on the BBC News site: "Paul Weller is an artist who scores on every measure and typifies the range and quality of British music at its best." Range?? He doesn’t have a range!! You can tell a Weller song at 50 paces. That inexplicable sudden urge to slash your wrists or hang yourself is always the giveaway.

Sorry, I wasn’t expecting that mini rant. Let’s get cheerful. Listening to the band-of-the-moment Kaiser Chiefs on the way in to work, it occurred to me that apart from none of them having even been out of nappies at the time, there is very little to distinguish them from the post-punk bands of the late 70s, which was about when I started to enjoy music that wasn’t classical or Abba. (I was a late developer.) It's like everything in between had never happened. Given that this means cutting out the Stock Aitken Waterman music factory and the glut of boy and girl bands that happened since, this is no bad thing.

Age rage

It had to happen one day. Last night I had to take my glasses off to read some small print.

In my defence, the small print was the obscure glyph meant to distinguish a line-in port from a line-out port, on the back of a computer, with no direct light source. So part of the problem was internal reflection off my lenses. Part of the problem, but not all of it.

I'm 41 today and I need bifocals ...

Not exactly breaking news ...

... but there's an excellent eulogy for the late, great Smash Hits here. To be honest, having last peeked inside the covers when I was about 16 and the New Romantics were It, I had no idea it lasted so long. But there's not one sentiment in the article that I don't agree with.

They had a cartoon strip, briefly, circa 1981, about the snailphobic Zitty Ben. And I didn't resent it. That's how much I enjoyed Smash Hits.

Note to the Prime Minister

Poor Tony. Having recently managed to lose a key vote because just one MP failed to turn up - himself - he is now stuck in South Africa with a broken down plane while another key vote goes through the Commons.

Note to PM. Stop trying to be an international statesman. Be a parliamentarian instead.

Timor ignorami conturbat me

Now, pay attention.

Tomorrow (my birthday, if anyone's interested) "noted physicist Dr. Franklin Felber will present his new exact solution of Einstein's 90-year-old gravitational field equation to the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF) in Albuquerque. The solution is the first that accounts for masses moving near the speed of light." This from http://www.physorg.com/news10789.html, and too many other sites as well.

I would so love for Dr F to be onto something here. He sees us reaching speeds of 90% of the speed of light by the end of the century ... cutting the trip to Alpha Centauri to a mere 5 years (assuming you don't need to slow down before arriving), and to any habitable planet still well outside the average human lifespan, but let's not quibble. But my sceptical skiffy antennae twitch.

First, there's the basic kneejerk instinct that anything including phrases like "antigravity solutions of Einstein's theory" and sentences like "Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it" is probably wrong.

Then there's my sceptical journalistic antennae, a tad underdeveloped but by no means atrophied. Dr F is Vice President and Co Founder of Starmark Inc, in San Diego. Starmark Inc is extremely hard to find on Google - or at least the San Diego version is. StarMark Cabinetry of Sioux Falls, South Dakota is easier. I eventually track down the San Diego company and find them listed as manufacturers of "light reconnaissance and surveillance systems, sensors and equipment for naval and aeronautics". And doubtless very good at it, too (still no website, though), but still not yer obvious candidate for sourcing revolutionary theories of antigravity propulsion.

Dr F himself, someone points out, gets less than 40 hits on Google. I've got more than that. Renowned physicists probably get more, you can't help thinking.

He is presenting his talk at STAIF, as advertised, in a session that also includes "Experimental Concepts for Generating Negative Energy in the Laboratory" and "The Alcubierre Warp Drive in Higher Dimensional Spacetime". In other words, the Analog readers' technological speculation slot.

So I have to confess I won't be holding my breath.

What is somewhat dispiriting is to find the text of the press release - issued by Starmark (not the cabinet makers), who else - reproduced without comment on far too many sites. It was brought to my attention, with much amusement, by a group of Year 11, 12 and 13 boys. They, products of the state funded English secondary education system, could spot the flaws in it. Somehow all those technical web editors out there can't.

Felber's news leaves me cold, but this makes me faintly disquieted.

Sometimes it's too easy

So there I was, looking up some facts about the Battle of Kohima (where my grandfather fought in 1944). A comment by Field Marshal Slim was made to the effect that Kohima, which finally turned back the Japanese from India, was similar in importance to Thermopylae, where the might of Persia was turned back from Europe in 480 BC.

One click of the mouse later, and I'm reminded that the pass at Thermopylae was held against 40,000 Persians by a mere 300 Spartans, 700 Greeks and ...

... 600 Thespians.

Insert your own punchline here.

Cluck?

Am I a coward? Or just wise? Or perhaps a combination of the two, with a touch of sensitivity thrown in. (I'm very proud of my sensitivity.)

Whatever. When I posted that last comment about those bloody cartoons, Friday afternoon, I included a couple of links to where you could find them on the web. They're not actually that funny (except maybe the one about the virgins). Then I slept on it. Then on Saturday morning I replaced the links with that bit about "a not too hard web search".

Everything is permissible, St Paul points out ... but not everything is beneficial. (A point that could also be taken on board by American gun nuts who maintain they are allowed to carry guns, so there, and in fact by obsessives everywhere who like to stand on their rights because it says they can, right here.) Publishing those cartoons really wasn't beneficial, and free speech isn't affected by not publishing them, because you can post them on the web and there's not a thing anyone can do about it. The only difference between posting on the web and, as happened, posting them in a newspaper is that in the latter scenario, presumably the artists got paid.

"What if it was Jesus?" - that's a rhetorical question that is (fairly enough) posed by some parties to explain the offence taken in the Muslim world at lampoons of the Prophet. What if someone drew a cartoon of Jesus with a bomb for a turban? My answer would be: (1) I'd point out that he was Jewish, not Arab and (2) I would seek out the reasons for why the artist has come to associate Jesus and bombs in the same breath. Then I would endeavour to correct that point of view by positive example. Admittedly that would be easier nowadays than a few centuries ago, in the glory days of Crusades, the Inquisition et al. (This is the fourteenth century of the Islamic calendar - maybe all religions have to go through these middle ages?)

And then I might settle down again to watch those Family Guy cartoons, or the Life of Brian (which are both really very funny), secure in the knowledge that Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, has a fully human sense of humour too.

This Sunday I was at a slightly whackier church than I usually attend, but the preacher made a great point about the Nicene Creed, the Apostles Creed and probably every other creed. Their theology and doctrine are impeccable, but they say absolutely nothing about lifestyle or ministry. They are very much a product of the days when mission was done at the point of a sword, and as long as you could say the right words, you weren't burnt at the stake. More Shock-and-Awe than Hearts-and-Minds. We can learn from that. So can our rioting friends.

Incidentally, the gentleman lampooned in the cartoons appears briefly in Dante's Inferno, and not favourably. Expect fundamentalist riots in Florence any time soon ... after it actually occurs to one of them to read some literature.

Compare and contrast

What has Jesus had to put up with over the last 2000 years?

A lot of heresies. The Last Temptation of Christ. The Life of Brian. The sincere admiration of Torquemada and the Revd Ian Paisley. Portrayal by blond, blue eyed, Swedish Max von Sydow. The music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Godspell. Guest appearances on The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park. That poem in Gay News. His name being used as an exclamation of anything from approval to disgust. He's in a song by Chris de Burgh, for crying out loud. In fact, two that I can think of, if you count an early appearance as a baby. And yet the church persists.

Attacks on the Prophet Mohammed: an impenetrable literary tome by Salman Rushdie that, face it, no one actually read. The Not the Nine O'Clock News "Ayatollah Song". Oh, and some cartoons which you can find with a not too hard web search.

Personally, I think he can take it.

You can ring my be-e-e-e-ell, ring my bell

One more item crossed off the list, when Best Beloved and I went to register our intent to marry. Production of passports, utility bills etc. proved our identities; gruelling questions like "do you know her postcode" (I don't, but can tell you how to get there) served to prove that we had a passing acquaintance and weren't doing this frivolously, for convenience or whatever.

This sign was in the waiting room, though I'm not sure what the registrar's own matrimonial intentions have to do with anything.

True LibDem

To have one bisexual leadership contender in your party is a misfortune, to have two ... Quite an ironic subject to be paraphrasing Oscar Wilde on, really.

But, honestly. Oaten is married with children when not romping with rent boys. Hughes, unmarried, admits to relationships with men and women. Bloody Liberal Democrats, can't even decide if they want to be gay or not ...

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it

Every now and then I feel I am afforded a salutory glance into Hell.

There was the time I looked at a former neighbour's trade weekly, still being sent to his address long after he moved out, so I could get it returned to sender. He was a double glazing salesman. (He also quite distinctly told me he was moving to Kent. After he left he started getting mail from estate agents in Norfolk, and a debt collector came looking for him. Maybe in a story one day ...) The trade weekly read by double glazing salesmen is foul and blasphemous literature for those who have whetted their appetites on the Necronomicon and want to move on to something meatier. Page after page of sales statistics, gloating and preening for those who have milked the life savings out of frail pensioners, snivelling and apologetic for those whose sales have shown a drop. Stakhanovite praise to the high achievers, stark rebukes and thinly veiled threats to the ones falling behind. Not a shred, not a cell, not a particle of decency or humanity at any point between the covers. And perhaps not surprisingly, no editorial address either.

And then there was Tuesday night ... On Monday I taped Life on Mars, on Tuesday I watched it while I did the ironing. But it was a large pile to get through and Life on Mars finished. So I stopped the tape, and found myself in the middle of what seems likely to become a legendary exchange of views on Celebrity Big Brother. Reader, I watched it for 20 minutes. That's 19 minutes and 30 seconds more than I have managed since the show started. I still feel vaguely soiled.

Being locked up with Gorgeous for three weeks must already equate with at least the anteroom to Hell. But when Michael Barrymore is the one rising above the occasion with grace and dignity, and Pete Burns emerges as the voice of maturity, rebuking some child of about 12 whom I totally failed to recognise on what is and what isn't appropriate to say to a man with a drink problem ... That has to take you down the third circle, minimum.

And now George is out. Gorgeous Galloway: hell could not hold him ...

A la recherche du pestes de vampires perdu

San Diego State University runs a Children's Literature Program: details at http://childlit.sdsu.edu/courses/course_descriptionsSP06.htm. The Spring 2006 course applies a number of critical approaches "including psychoanalysis, deconstruction, existentialism, feminism, and Marxism" to a list of children's texts, including - um - Sebastian Rook's Vampire Plagues: London.

Sebastian pithily comments: "yer what?"

Your name in my files

Finally got round to installing some visitor tracking HTML, and interesting viewing it makes.

First, there's many more readers than I had thought there would be out there: hello to all you silent types, you are all groovy people.

Second, David: if I see you've been browsing this site when you should be doing your homework again, I won't tell your mum. Her job to be vigilant, not mine.

And finally, greetings to the Australian individual who came here following an MSN search for "C S Lewis freemason". I presume you found my posting of a few days ago. I hope you weren't too disappointed. Well, you came back three times anyway ...

The days of Grocer Jack

By way of passing on the favour, and for anyone else who shares the belief that digital rights management is a tool of darkness even for those of us who want to buy our tracks legally, let me tell you about allofmp3.com, where you can get a huge amount of stuff, not protected, so you can copy it to another computer or your MP3 player or whatever, and it's legal. That huge amount of stuff is because, with a Slavic combination of practicality and disregard for the more irritating aspects of intellectual property law, they rip it straight off CDs.

Yeah, yeah, it can't possibly be legal, especially that last bit. But some googling got me enough to assure me that:

• you couldn't have a set-up like this under many jurisdictions, but it IS legal under Russian law.
• the money you pay goes to the artists. Not necessarily to the rights holders, but to the artists. There's a difference.

It's also considerably cheaper than something like tescodownloads.com, charging by volume rather than per track.

The advantage of this is that if - hypothetically - you hear The Honeycombs's Have I the Right? playing on Wogan's show on the way in to work, then a few short minutes later you too can be the proud and legal owner of a copy. Further, if - hypothetically - you're the kind of person who can't walk into Halfords or a bike shop without being seized with the urge to Buy Accessories, and you track down your copy of Have I the Right in a sixties classics collection, then you can also come away with copies of The Monkees's Daydream Believer, David McWilliams's The Days of Pearly Spencer and Keith West's Excerpt from a Teenage Opera.

If anyone can convince me it's NOT legal then I will - reluctantly - delete all the tracks I've got off it ...

And meanwhile I will wonder if anyone else feels the urge to hum "Postman Pat" in place of "Grocer Jack". Or vice versa.

Shed a tear, but not a big one

Much of last weekend, and of this, and much of the foreseeable future too, has been / will be spent transforming a bachelor pad of 14 years standing into a home fit for a lady + child. First stage is to make room for it all. Here is just some of the room we have made so far. It all - just - fitted into the back of an estate Vectra and was transported up to the dump-... um, the waste recycling centre. 14 years worth of junk. Gone. Juslikat.

Also to be taken into account in the clearout stakes are another delivery of about half the above size to the dump last week; again approximately half the above amount, slightly more sellable, which was denoted to a tsunami relief jumble sale; and eight box files containing my collection of Interzone from #14 (1986) to the present, given to someone through Freecycle.

Also significant is that I finally got rid of several boxes of 3SF magazine and a box full of Big Engine books, which have been knocking around here for the last three years. (The rest of the junk sneered down upon them as mere children.) This led to a slight clash of wills between me ["this is taking up valuable space in my private home; I do not want it; it is unsellable; therefore it is private junk"] and the centre foreman ["this was the product of a company you ran, even though the company has not existed since 2003; therefore it is trade waste"] which was only resolved by the transfer of a £10 note, sadly in the wrong direction from my perspective, but it's one more step taken towards washing my hands of BE forever.

Okay, I admit it:
(1) I brought the Boy back again.
(2) Yes, he is wearing a strip of blue lino like a scarf.

Can we fix it? Yeah, all right

First: the scene from our kitchen window at work last week. Far from ideal - it used to be fields, or at least grass, all the way down to the ugly concrete thing in the background. But preferable to the second pic, which is the scene from the same window today.

The first scene - which is presumably ongoing - is because our beloved landlords thought it would be a good idea to build a brand new accommodation block six feet away from us. They incidentally plan to demolish this building, sooner or later. But just to show they are also caring and sharing types, they are replacing the windows of our building, which work perfectly well. To make it safe for the window people they first have to remove the asbestos that is apparently sealed into our walls. Of this building that has stood for 40 years. Without anyone dying. And which is scheduled for demolition.

So, we are now wrapped up like one of Christo's works in progress and eagerly awaiting next week when Russia's current cold snap hits us.

UPDATE:
The builders have cut through the main water supply and there is no cold water feed into the building. Toilets won't refill after flushing and - the unkindest cut - the coffee machines can only be topped up from the watercoolers.

We will be kept informed...

Extremely extreme

We hear today that extremists unfortunately linked to Fathers 4 Justice had the bright idea of kidnapping young Leo Blair to publicise their cause. Since any such attempt would probably have resulted in the Prime Minister's highly trained bodyguards delivering a magazineful of warning shots to the head, it's almost a shame they didn't try it. Leo would soon have got over it - he has a pretty scary mother, so there's probably little that can phase him - and the average intelligence of the human race would have received quite a boost.

I wonder if one extremist can recognise another? If you think abducting a five-year-old would do anything at all to gain sympathy for your cause, do you also think that animal rights are best protected by burning down research labs and the rights of the unborn by gunning down doctors who perform abortions? On the great venn diagram of extremism, do these circles overlap much, or are they distinct from each other, pointing fingers at the others and saying "cor, what a nutter?"

Answers on a fatwa, please.

Flying bishops for tea

The BBC today reports on a compromise plan to prevent the more crustacean bishops of the Church of England from leaving the church if woman bishops are introduced. Somewhat surreally the plan involves tea and flying bishops, but let's leave that for another joke. The Beeb helpfully adds: "The move to consecrate women bishops comes amid a row over the ordination of openly gay priests".

Well, yes, except that these are two pretty well distinct camps. There is a considerable overlap - those who are in favour of both, or neither ("both" outweighs "neither" in my experience) - but for the simplistic purposes of this little rant, I hold that those who have no problem with women clergy are by and large the more evangelical wing of the church, all in favour of modernisation like this, putting the prayer book into comprehensible English etc. but quite opposed to gay clergy (and hence, for ease of media reference, "traditionalist"). Meanwhile, those self-delusionists who like to believe that the whole Reformation thang was just an agreement between friends to differ, and that Jesus Christ - a man whose ministry slashed through accumulated centuries of dead dogma and who honoured and respected women in a society that treated them like dirt - could care less about the gender of his regional vice-presidents (and hence, for ease of media reference, "traditionalist"), tend to belong to the same wing as includes those of, um, progressive sexuality.

One thing that a Jehovah's Witness colleague and I can both agree on is to pay absolutely no attention whatsoever to media depictions of our respective churches. They will get it Wrong with a big Wuh.

Meanwhile, back on the Beeb site, the Bishop of Fulham, John Broadhurst, manages to sound like a child who has unexpectedly been deprived of a treat: "Are people like me to be driven out of the Church of England or not?" He goes on: "If people want to provide for us they really do have to talk to us." Well, yes, if ...

Alternatively, we could just say, Goodbye!

Complete and utter

I don't think I've called anyone a spaz since I was a boy, and even then I knew it wasn't a nice word. But honestly, sometimes it's the only one that fits.

Watch the gun carefully ...

Unwins resurrexit

I'm delighted to report that our local Unwins has been taken over by Threshers and is open again for business once more, with fresh stock and the same manager. So all's well, and all that.

One for Screwtape

For those who don't read Dave Langford's Ansible, there is a site here that explores and reveals the Satanic, occult and pagan symbology of, um, C.S. Lewis - "the single most useful tool of Satan since his appearance in the Christian community sometime around World War II".

The site makes a valiant stab at a tone of rational debate in the opening paragraph: "John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley all died on the same day. They all went to the same place. Kennedy went to hell because he trusted in the Roman Whore ..."

After that it becomes less evenly balanced. Suffice to say that Lewis apparently managed the quite remarkable trick of being a Roman Catholic Taoist occultist pagan deity worshipping freemason, as should be obvious to anyone who reads his works with half an eye or less.

Sadly, my motivation, desire and ability to be funny about these people all dry up about here.

Plague Lending Right

I think I was just about prepared for it.

As well as Ben I am also Sebastian, at least some of the time - Sebastian Rook, that is, author of the first three Vampire Plagues novels: London, Paris and Mexico. (That's as opposed to Sebastian Rook, author of the next three Vampire Plagues novels: Outbreak, Epidemic and Extermination, who is someone else entirely.) Someone else thinks up the plots, I'm the hack hired to write them.

And they're doing better than my own stuff, at least, according to this year's PLR statement. PLR is Public Lending Right, a fund set up by a grateful nation to reward those authors whose books are loaned by the nation's libraries. In the last 365 days, my own books have ranged between the low and the high 3-figure numbers of withdrawals, while the Vampire Plagues are both safely into 4 figures.

The breakdown in percentages of loans is:

• London: 32%
• Paris: 21%
• The Xenocide Mission pb: 15%
• The Xenocide Mission hb: 12%
• New World Order: 8%
• Winged Chariot: 6%
• His Majesty's Starship: 6%

Mexico wasn't out in time to register for the period; nor is the paperback New World Order.

Full-time hackwork, here I come. I'm not too proud and I'm sufficiently secure in my identity. No matter what the world may know me as, deep down I will always know that I am Sebastian. I mean Ben. Damn!

Right Honorable Charlie

There's something strangely Lib Dem about Charles Kennedy's fall from leadership. Not quite as spectacular as Caesar's, but a similar sense of finality.

He was an alcoholic, and his years of private and public denial are perfectly consistent with the type. When finally he faced his demons, summoning every atom of strength and willpower, he went public and threw himself on the mercy of those around him. In the real world, if a mate of yours came out like that then it would be unthinkable to knife him in the back. But of course, we're not talking about the real world, we're talking about politics, so out he goes.

Coming out as an alcoholic last week, and still expecting to remain viable as leader, was a Lib Dem solution to his problem: honest, simple, straightforward, fair, just, impractical and totally unworkable.

Sic semper tyrannis

Well, I wasn't expecting that! Julius Caesar ending up dead on the Senate floor, covered in knife wounds. Who'd have guessed?

Rome came to a mostly satisfying ending. Vorenus has managed to be at every important event throughout the fall of the Republic, but for perfectly good reasons manages to be away from this one. Everything that seemed to be going swimmingly - Caesar's dictatorship, Vorenus's private and public life - tumbles in ruin while what seemed to be beyond redemption - Pullo - ends on a high note.

For the record (and to save you watching the second series, if you don't really want to), here's what happened to some of the assassins, and others (according to Wikipedia, anyway). Bear in mind Caesar died in 44BC:

• Decimus Brutus: killed 43BC in the first round of the new civil wars following the assassination.
• Cassius: wrongly believed Brutus had lost the first Battle of Philippi against Octavian and Antony, and ordered his freeman Pindarus to slay him, 42BC.
• Marcus Junius Brutus: committed suicide 42BC following defeat at the second (and final) Battle of Philippi.
• Gaius Trebonius: murdered 43BC in events unrelated to the assassination.
• Cicero (not actually an assassin, but wished he had been): proscribed by Antony and rubbed out by Antony’s hitmen, 43BC.

Do you start to see a theme (and a timespan) developing? And one last key player in all this:

• The republic: by my calculations, not seen again until after World War II.

What didn't satisfy in Rome was the meeting of the uberbitches Servilia and Atia, where the latter is summoned by the former to gloat about what's happening over on the Capitoline. It was too reminiscent of monologuing baddies in lesser dramas. But I did enjoy the significant glances between the triumphant Servilia and surly Octavian. She has just made an enemy of the future Emperor Augustus. Oh man, is she in trouble ...

Now to work out a plot that includes them all

I rarely throw anything away, especially valuable, difficult to replace items like the folders I first used as a student. The former cradle of my philosophy notes 20 years ago now holds my bank statements, while my politics folder currently lies vacant but is destined to be the official wedding planning folder.

It's fun doing a forensic examination of the doodles made during lectures. As well as the SCM logo on the front of each (Student Christian Movement or Slightly Christian Marxists, take your pick) I can identify:

Politics folder:

• The Superman logo
• A Tripod
• Thunderbird 2, dorsal view
• The Terrahawks logo
• A Zeroid
• One of Zelda's Cubes
• Logan's gun, firing
• A Shogun Warrior, possibly Danguard
• A Klingon battlecruiser, side view
• A SHADO Interceptor
• USS Enterprise (NCC-1701 - all we had in those days)
• A UFO
• The SHADO logo
• The Liberator
• The TARDIS
• A SHADO mobile
• The TARDIS console, with roundels in the background
• The Liberator, front view
• Skydiver 1
• USS Enterprise, front view
• The Battlehawk
• Dark Star
• A Silurian
• A Cyberman, head shot only
  

Philosophy folder:

• a perspective view of the habitation module of the USS Discovery, angled to show the three pod bay doors
• A space shuttle taking off
• A gun, possibly modelled on those used by the time travelling guerillas in 'Day of the Daleks'
• An astronaut
• A Dalek exterminating someone, with the appropriate negative-exposure effect
• A zeppelin
• The TARDIS
• The Liberator
• USS Discovery in orbit around Saturn (or possibly, USS Discovery on its own, plus an unidentified ringed planet)
• A Klingon battlecruiser, dorsal view
  
• A TIE fighter, side view
• Probably an Imperial Stormtrooper, or else a man in futuristic armour of my own devising
  
• The names of the leaders of the Soviet Union from Lenin to Gorbachev, written in Cyrillic

I also seem to have spent at least one lecture working out how many words I can get out of 'METAPHYSICS' (itself quite a metaphysical activity). There's quite a lot.

I wonder if I learnt anything?

Matrimony, Christmas and a rant

I feel moved to use the medium of poetry to describe the keyest of recent developments:

Up on the Ridgeway, so it is said
Ben and his loved one got engaged to be wed.
Out in the open for everyone to see [1]
Ben said it in Swedish [2] and on one knee.
The ring belonged to Ben's mother-great-grand
She put up a struggle but we got it off her hand.

[1] i.e. a couple of circling red kites and anyone in Wantage with a really good telescope.
[2] Vill du gifta dig med mig?

At this point my poetic muse breaks free and runs gibbering to the hills but that's the gist of it. This news may introduce additional characters to this blog, who to spare their blushes will be referred to as Best Beloved and her 13-year-old son, the Boy.

The Boy was the first to be told the good news. As he thoughtfully shared with his mother, "I suppose you couldn't really say no, what with it being Christmas and all ..."

Christmas was spent enjoying the cuteness of my 3-year-old nephew and 9-month-old niece, and shuttling between various forms of sleeping accommodation, which depended on whether my sister's family was in residence or not. My parents have bought the second wing of their U-shaped house in the gradual quest for reunification of the building, and have no further territorial ambitions at present. The Sudetenland is now in the throes of severe redecoration but at least has heating, so we spent one night there, then two nights in the main house, then back to exile for a further three.

Christmas TV ...

1. Dr Who. Silly but fun. I wasn't encouraged by advance talk of killer Santas etc. but they downplayed the silliness to a just about acceptable level. It really sagged with David Tennant's non-stop monologuing holding several thousand xenocidal aliens in thrall (why couldn't one of them just shoot him? Hey? Why?) but apart from that ...

2. Rome. Or as my father calls it, Maximus Bonkus, though very little of that this time round. Just Titus Pullo suggesting that relationship counselling may not be his calling but a little anger management couldn't hurt.

3. Return of the Goodies. This should have been 1.5 hours of archive excellence, but deduct at least 30 minutes for talking heads explaining to us why it was funny. After five minutes of people banging on about the Funky Gibbon it was decreed that we should Turn Over to the Magic of Jesus. This proved to be unutterably ghastly, but thankfully it hit a commercial break and we turned back to the Goodies again. By now they had moved on to Kitten Kong and of course we were hooked, with only occasional talking heads popping up from time to time.

WHY DO THEY DO THIS? Did the original episodes have interrupting commentaries to explain the jokes we had just seen? Okay, the contributions of those who were involved are relevant - the three eponynous ones, plus John Cleese and others. But we don't need (say) Martin Freeman sharing his memories. If we ever need to know how Martin Freeman's career was affected by the Goodies in his childhood, that can surely wait until he gets a retrospective documentary on his own career in 20 years time.

Rant over, on with things. Happy New Year!

The even newer New World Order

Got my author's copies of the paperback New World Order yesterday, and it rocks.

The cover is everything I've ever wanted in a paperback. Strongly reminiscent of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines et al, it features:

• an airship
• an army attacking a
• burning castle

Could there be a better reason for buying it? The fact that these three elements don't coincide into one scene at any point in the narrative - in fact the castle doesn't burn at all - has nothing to do with anything. Buy it. Now.

Meanwhile, a colleague suggests a reason for those infuriating gaps in Tacitus mentioned previously, and I must confess it's more plausible than my theory of supernatural entities known only as writers intruding into our time/space continuum. Time travellers, it is posited, went back to the Library of Alexandria and withdrew the manuscripts in question. Sadly we haven't yet caught up with whichever bit of the future they went to. But there's hope it may happen in my lifetime.

This is almost certainly the last post before Christmas, so HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

The unbearable cuteness of being 3

My (almost) 3-year-old nephew has combined two of the trad elements of the Christmas story, discarded words he doesn't know in favour of similar words that he does, and decided that Baby Jesus was visited by three leopards. Ah-h-h-h.

In other news, I learned last night that the altar of a church somewhere in Germany, near where a friend's family lives, contains a sacred relic of a virgin from Cologne. It's a bone. And straightaway, as if divinely inspired, there came to me:

A certain young maid of Cologne
Was frightened of dying alone
She got to the altar
With scarcely a falter
But just in the form of a bone.

And finally, I'm still reeling slightly from hearing Elaine Paige (Elaine Paige!) singing Greg Lake's (Greg Lake's!) "I Believe in Father Christmas". One of the great Christmas ballads about the lies and disillusion of this most commercial of seasons, reduced to a showtune. Bring on the leopards.

Sevens

M'fellow Warrior for the Lord Tweed has set me this challenge, a meaningless list of lists in no particular order:

SEVEN...

...THINGS TO DO BEFORE I DIE

1. Explore the lost civilisations of South America
2. Visit the wreck of the Titanic
3. Get really good at guitar
4. Go to Mars
5. Learn Swedish
6. Learn to fly a helicopter
7. Write a successful screenplay

...THINGS I CANNOT DO

1. Think of the Daily Mail without contempt
2. Be remotely interested in soap operas, sport or reality TV
3. Regard the prospect of an over-crowded, over-loud party where everyone is expected to have a good time with anything other than fear and loathing
4. Tolerate bad logic and/or science and/or theology and/or writing
5. Speak Urdu
6. Enjoy rap
7. Remember faces

...THINGS I SAY MOST OFTEN

1. Stupid bloody machine
2. Exactly
3. Oi!
4. Not interested
5. Your reckon?
6. Yer what?
7. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen

...BOOKS I LOVE (my own not included)

1. I, Claudius
2. Ender’s Game
3. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
4. Dune
5. The Cruel Sea
6. Jan Guillou’s Templar trilogy (they must be available in one volume ...)
7. The Sacred Diaries of Adrian Plass / Horizontal Epistles of Andromeda Veal / Theatrical Tapes of Leonard Thynn (ditto)

...FILMS I COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER

1. Alien(s)
2. The Day the Earth Stood Still
3. The Iron Giant
4. The Jungle Book
5. Master and Commander
6. North by North West
7. Once Upon a Time in the West
8. GalaxyQuest
9. Forbidden Planet

I know that’s 9, so I’ll deduct two from the next.

...PEOPLE TO DO THIS NEXT

1. Daniel Matthews
2. Dhon Do
3. Joel Gilmore
4. Michael Gilmore
5. Rico Garron

Your call REALLY IS important to us

Well, I wasn't expecting that. Contents insurance is up for renewal, so I called the company, and got the usual Boolean "If ... Then ..." instructions, plus a quite lengthy litany on what this company is and isn't empowered to do, then a return to the Booleans. Finally I seemed to be through, but of course all operatives were busy, so I settled down to a nice half hour of Brian Eno's greatest hits punctuated by esteem-lowering protestations that my call is important, no, really.

But then, get this, I got the option to enter my phone number and they would call me back. So I did, and they did, and within 10 minutes I was giving my card details to a nice Welsh lady.

Every other company in the entire world with an automated switchboard, please take note.

Unwins RIP

I’ve always tried to give my alcohol-purchasing patronage to the local Unwins when I can. It's a two minute walk from home and I like to support the little man in the War Against Tesco.

The other day I wanted a bottle of wine for Friday evening. The wind was howling and the rain was lashing down, so it seemed a good idea to stop off at Unwins on the way back from work. I could park in the lay-by outside the shop.

This actually meant driving past Unwins on the other side of the road, disappearing into some side streets, taking several right turns and finally turning across the main stream of traffic to put me on the same side of the road as the lay-by. When I got there, I found the lay-by was coned off by road works. So I went home anyway, and walked back through the torrential downpour, and found that their stock consisted of about two bottles of bubbly and that was it. "Try Tesco ..." the lady suggested. So I walked back home and drove to Tesco, dripping quietly in my nice dry car.

All this, I might add, in a Friday evening rush hour, never exceeding an average speed of about 3mph. That bottle took close on an hour to purchase. Less to drink, though.

It’s all dead symbolic, because Unwins has been struggling for a year to keep its head above water. Stock at the local shop has been in steady decline for months; every time I’ve been in there has been less on offer and more effusive promises that a complete revamp by the new owners is just around the corner. Yesterday brought the news that Unwins had gone into administration, with 400+ staff laid off. Today brings the news that the remaining 1400 staff have been laid off and a buyer is being sought for the numerous properties scattered at key, community-friendly locations around the country. A sad day for small business and an even sadder one for the staff.

I’d wish them a Happy Christmas but I’m not sure those are the best words to use. No, I’m wrong, they are. If you know an ex-Unwins employee, or anyone in straitened circumstances, you can wish them a Happy Christmas and really mean the good wishes.

Beat the Christmas stress in church

Going to church on Christmas Day isn't a guaranteed remedy to Christmas stress. It's certainly not the only one. But it does help.

The worst thing about Christmas is the sheer inevitable machinery. It's Christmas so we [delete as appropriate] have to eat brussell sprouts / visit the relatives / go to some ghastly fun-enforced party ... and so on. A service on Christmas Day won't solve any of those, but it will help to give a bit of context. Maybe make you feel there's something worth celebrating. It will strip away the modern trappings of Santa et al and get you down to the basics. Listen carefully to the words of the carols and you'll get the whole Christmas message, encapsulated into soundbite form.

You also get some structure to the day, something to work around, and best of all, it's all someone else's problem. For a couple of hours that morning, there is not a single thing you can do to change how the rest of the day will proceed. So put your feet up and let someone else do the work. And for those precious couple of hours, the kids will be physically distanced from presents, food and drink. If you find a church with a good creche, they can be someone else's problem too. For a couple of hours.

Of course, for some people the whole going-to-church thing may be part of the mechanical process. Well, you have to be selective. If the church wants you there then it's the church's job to make itself attractive. So, if your church is cold and uncomfortable and the services are long and boring and incomprehensible, vote with your feet and try another. They don't all have to be like that. Ours isn't ...

Getting the right church may require some reconnaissance beforehand, so why not be well prepared for Christmas 2006 by starting in January?

I can't think of a witty Kong pun

I won’t say too much about King Kong for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it. But I will highly recommend it.

Peter Jackson goes to the source and tweaks it, ever so slightly. His triumph is to bring the settings alive and to add character. Skull Island, even more than Middle Earth, is a place scattered with ruins so old that archaeology has practically become geology – everywhere we see tantalising glimpses of an ancient civilisation, whose descendants now cower in savagery in a barren enclave on the coast. The island is verdant and alive, while they starve out of fear. And the film is more brutally honest about depression-era New York than the original ever was, with shanty towns and soup kitchens at the feet of the nascent skyscrapers.

Jack Driscoll isn’t a hero, he’s a playwright. Ann Darrow is already nine tenths in love with him, sight unseen, because of his writing, in which (yes, really) she discerns qualities that she later also sees in Kong. The two of them both have too much taste to take part in the hideous Kong-o-rama that Denham lays on in New York, yet how they still both end up getting involved makes perfect sense. And Ann Darrow, a woman who can wear only a skimpy satin number on a cold winter’s night in New York and not even goosepimple, makes several unilateral decisions on her own that affect the outcome of the plot. Fay just screamed, as I recall.

Even the supporting characters have life. Carl Denham convincingly shows flashes of a genuinely decent man buried beneath layers of monomania, and I even found a soft spot for the gruff Captain Englehorn, despite my feeling that within the next ten years he’ll be sizing up Allied shipping through the periscope of his U-Boat.

The 1970s Kong is wisely ignored -- though that effort did improve on the original in one respect. In the original, and in this, I couldn't help thinking: how exactly did they transport Kong to New York?

Strangely, though, I thought the film lets itself down with its effects. They are every bit as state of the art, for their time, as the original – but still, like the original, there are moments you’re thinking “Oh, come on”. These usually relate to Kong shaking Ann Darrow like a ragdoll in a way which would snap every bone in her body. Or Ann being so still and rigid in his hands that you suspect it isn’t really her.

But those I could forgive. What I can’t is those scenes where the effects take over and the characters vanish. It’s a sad descent into Van Helsing or Phantom Menace territory – never mind the quality, feel the bandwidth. Digital pixels go mad with digital pixels and you begin to think – so what? Kong has a fight with not one, not two but three dinosaurs ... and he fights ... and he fights ... and he falls down a ravine ... and so do the dinosaurs ... and Ann ... and they fight ... And after a while you really are beginning to fidget and wish something new would happen.

To get the most of Peter Jackson’s Rings films, you need to see the extended editions. Here I felt I had seen the extended edition, and I was wishing I was watching an edited cut. But for all that it is, like the original, a film that gives us so much that lesser film makers will be nibbling off it for years to come.

The Caesarion section

So, Pullo and Vorenus continue to tick off items to attend on their I-Spy List of Key Events Surrounding the Fall of the Roman Republic. This week they managed to be present at the conception of Caesar and Cleopatra's child, Caesarion. Titus Pullo -- who is basically Joey from Friends, with the added ability to kill people -- managed to be even closer to the event than Caesar, which is quite a feat.

Meanwhile the fast-forwarding of the writers through history continues: Caesar's year-long siege in Alexandria and the gestation and birth of Caesarion are dealt with in about 30 seconds, much as Pharsalus was last week. I've discovered there is precedent for this in the unlikely form of Tacitus, whose Annals of Imperial Rome I am currently reading. Writing safely in the reign of Hadrian he is able to give a good warts-and-all overview of the early days of the Empire, backing things up with facts and figures and (occasionally tedious) minutiae. Then when he comes to a really good bit -- like the fall of Sejanus, or the entire reign of Caligula -- we just get a dry footnote to say that this portion of the manuscript is lost.

Once, I could forgive. When it happens twice, I start to suspect a conspiracy. It's those writers, I tell you. Their influence is spreading beyond the fictitious metaverse of early Rome. They don't want us to read the official histories. They want us to watch Rome and I, Claudius.

Son of an MP

MPs do have a reputation for increasing the population by means other than the sanctity of the marriage bed. It's probably unfair and grossly exaggerated ... and yet, I'm sure you can name more MPs who have sired sprogs the wrong side of the sheets than you can fellow co-workers.

I had a sudden insight into why this might be when listening to the Today programme report on Charles Kennedy, the sixth Tracy brother, and the treatment he received yesterday in the House. Now the Conservatives have set the trend for changing leaders, it seems certain people are rather hoping the Lib Dems are going to follow it. Or put another way, if CK isn't yet in an IDS situation, they very soon hope he will be even if they have to manufacture it themselves. Anyway -- "Mr Charles Kennedy", intones the Speaker, and the entire august body of honorable members erupts in laughs, jeers and catcalls. It was like a five year old's birthday party, but with less measured debate.

A quick Google tells me that the average age of MPs in 2005 is 51, meaning that most are of an age to have young-to-teenage children. But if that is the kind of behaviour Daddy gets up to, how can you ever hope to be entrusted with the responsibility of raising offspring? If kids look to their parents as exemplars then the children of the present House will be tomorrow's looters and rioters.

As Eric Burdon of The Animals once said, it's very hard to raise a kid when you're best known for singing "It's my life and I'll do what I want." I'd have said he's best known for singing about a Louisiana brothel, but I suppose the end result is the same.

Anyways, it follows that since any kind of responsible family life for an MP is out of the question, the only way to propagate is to inseminate your mistress and let her take the rap for the child rearing. Put that way, being an MP's bit on the side is almost a civic duty, which is surely the only possible explanation for the late Robin Cook's private life.

Faint praise

I have few intellectual pretensions. I was never a great scholar. I had a pretty good education but I never excelled at anything.

My weakest subjects were the sciences, which is maybe why I'm easily impressed by anyone who is good at them. My O-levels got me a C in Biology, a C in Physics at the second try, and an E in Chemistry, which frankly I thought was pretty good.

But I'm still brighter than those morons on Space Cadets.

And these people have votes.

Little credit for the taxman

Dear HM Revenue and Customs,

Are we perhaps unfamiliar with the idea of this new-fangled web thingy?

Today's news brings us the sad tale of up to 1,500 staff at the Department for Work and Pensions who have had their identities stolen in a tax fraud. The fraudsters' work was made easier by the fact that, having swiped a few basic details from the hapless DWP folk, all they had to do was enter said details on your website and emigrate to Marbella on the billions that you kindly channelled into their bank accounts. It was made doubly easier by the fact that tax credits don't even have to be paid into the same bank account as the person they are allegedly for.

You have responded by the utterly non-panicky, considered and measured step of completely shutting down the online service, so that now honest people can't even calculate what they might be eligible for.

A spokesman on the news tells us that in fact online applications are subject to a number of tests, but won't go into details for security reasons. Well, quite, we can all see how useful that would be.

It seems your mistake was to assume that the purpose of the web is to give away money. It is not. It is however quite a useful gizmo for sharing information. You will find most banks and building societies offer online mortgage and loan calculators for the convenience of customers, which in no way actually commit said banks and building societies to hand out dosh. But they do let everyone know where they stand, which is useful.

You will find that the difference between calculating eligibility and automatically assigning money to someone is about one and a half lines of HTML code, or at the worst, maybe Javascript. If you like, I will be glad to remove these lines for you. My rates are most reasonable. You will then be able to offer a commitment-free calculator service, and everyone except the conmen will be happy.

Sincerely,
Ben

Quit fauning, Tumnus

Things I learnt from watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe yesterday:

• Evil witches have the best style and biggest hair. Said hair can double in volume overnight if battle is looming and we need to look good.
  
• In Narnia as elsewhere, you send in your air support first to pave the way for the infantry.
• Nasty, near fatal gut wounds don't show even the slightest drop of blood.
• If you fall over in snow wearing nothing but pyjamas and a dressing gown, you don't try to brush it off.
• Wolves talk like American gangsters. Beavers talk cockney, and look cute in chainmail.
  
• You can run from Father Christmas but you can't hide.

And one unanswered question: who were Tumnus's presents for?

Roma ad scribendi

"They have powerful gods," observes Caesar of Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, and their ability to turn up at every single key event in the Roman civil wars. Indeed they do. Entities more powerful even than Capitoline Jove watch over the lives of our heroes. Powerful creatures known only as writers.

The existence of the writers is surely evident to anyone with eyes. Cynics may sneer and point out that in an infinite universe billions of years old then surely any combination of events can occur in an apparently causal manner. But, I ask you: Vorenus and Pullo are stranded on a deserted sandbank in the middle of the Mediterranean. Vorenus, a man who has previously shown no evidence of imagination or scientific insight whatsoever, spots how high a bloated corpse is floating in the water, has a sudden insight about Platonic ether, and in no time at all he and Pullo have lashed together a raft of flotsam and bodies that gets them all the way to Greece and (even more important) tosses them onto the beach right in front of Pompey Magnus. Who can disbelieve after that?

Like the Roman gods, the writers aren't perfect, and they sometimes spend so much attention on one area that they forget about another. There can be no other reason for the non-battle in which Pompey is finally defeated. "Send word to Rome," barks the Man. "The decisive battle takes place today." Cue stirring music and lots of manly strapping on of armour. Then ten seconds of two legionaries fighting in slow-mo, and Caesar's triumphant return to camp. What??

But, as if to make up, the writers did give us some unexpected hot girl-on-girl action back in Rome between Caesar's mistress (raddled trout) and the future wife of Mark Antony and grandmother of Claudius (young teen nymph). If we'd got to read about that in my Latin lessons then I wouldn't have given up the subject when I was 14.

Widdle while you work

Just got back from the Random House Children's Books Christmas party in London: an annual event to commemorate the birth of Christ by packing 200 people with glasses of wine into a couple of rooms and having them conduct conversations by shouting very loudly. Still, it's a pleasant time.

When I went to let some of the wine out before starting home, there were a couple of authors ahead of me who had just got to the washing hands stage, talking to each other about the genres they wrote in, publishing deals, etc. etc. From questions like "so why did you start writing" they obviously hadn't known each other long. Probably not from before entering the washroom. It was also obviously an advanced stage of the conversation -- so advanced that either they had been washing their hands for a very long time, or else had been conducting the conversation and possibly the initial introductions during the earlier stage of the process that gave them something to wash.

Now, I'm all for networking, but there's a time and there's a place ...

Every car should have a story

My first car was a Renault 4. That's like a 2CV, with backbone. One of its more entertaining features was that the engine could keep chugging on at reduced power, sometimes for up to 10 seconds, after you turned it off. Eventually there would a pfft as all the stray gases running around the system blew out a hose that was plugged on just below the air filter. All you had to do was plug it back in again when you wanted the car to start, and you were fine.

My next car was a Ford Escort. Oh, the delight of being able to turn up at KwikFit with a blowing exhaust and have them just take a new one off the shelf! But then this car also developed an idiosyncrasy in that the engine would not restart, if you turned it off and left it for more than about a minute, until it had cooled down for about half an hour or so. On occasions where I had no choice but to turn it off, with a chance of restarting within half an hour, I had to open the hood to let it cool. This was eventually traced to a faulty ignition coil.

The present vehicle was doing fine in the idiosyncrasy stakes until last night when, approahcing 11pm, I tried to turn it on and got -- nothing. Zilch. Not even that whirring turning over noise a car makes when the battery is flat. Nothing. And I was miles from home, and it was raining. Thank the Lord and all his little angels for the AA.

Turned out one of the battery terminals had eroded right off the battery. It was still securely held by the cables that connected to it -- but not to the battery. My Knight of the Road (or is that the RAC?) had never seen anything like it. But he soon put a new battery in and that was fine.

Except that now the electronics need rekeying or something. He warned me this would be the case. The radio and tape player won't work.

Which brings me back to a rant of a few days ago. Modern electronic devices in cars. Why?!?

You couldn't make it up

Despite being older than the Leader of the Opposition, I am prepared to concede that the boy Cameron may have some ability. Enough to make his lot a decent Opposition party, anyway. I'm not sure I would actually want them in government, but then, I don't particularly want the current lot either. I'm just undecided and vacillating and my views should not be taken seriously by any politician.

Besides, one can make over-confident assertions before all the facts are in. I have a newspaper cutting which I found behind the mirror of my wardrobe -- you really couldn't make this kind of thing up; can you imagine a plot device like that being taken seriously in a story? -- from, I think, the Daily Express of 1925. One of the stories, "Sir T. Beecham as Politician", tells how the previous night Sir Thomas Beecham had made a speech at Queen's Hall. He was angry about the Locarno Pact (which is how I know this was 1925, possibly early 1926) and also about Mr Stanley Baldwin's appointment in 1924 of a new Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Baldwin came to power, he said, with "a considerable wealth of youthful talent, enthusiastic talent burning to work." He goes on: "Whom did he take? The despised and rejected of another political party ... [Ben tantalisingly cuts the name of the individual] ... I regarded his appointment as one of the tragic circumstances of English politics."

Sadly, he was right in that the gent in question was a rubbish Chancellor ... but I believe he enjoyed some success in the next job up the greasy pole a few years later. And the name of the gent was, of course, Mr Winston S. Churchill.

Dawkins' God

Well, I finished it and I would recommend it to anyone. Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life, by Alistair McGrath, ISBN 1-4051-2538-1.

What's immediately refreshing is that McGrath is also less than favourable towards a couple of unconvincing Christian arguments in favour of God -- the "mad, bad or God" argument (sadly, a staple of the otherwise pretty good Alpha Course), and Paley's Watch, which apparently had already come under heavy criticism from theologians like John Henry Newman before Darwin.

That's because, quite simply, McGrath is a scientist as well as a theologican, and has much more regard for logic than, apparently, Mr D himself. Time and time again he takes Dawkins' arguments and shows in simple terms how they just do not add up. Let no one doubt Dawkins' excellence at describing evolution, but please, let no one take seriously his own blind leaps of faith, from that to "therefore religion is all rubbish."

There is no doubt that Darwin, evolution et al is completely incompatible with the waffle of the creationist brigade -- but then McGrath, unlike Dawkins but like most Christians I know, is entirely aware of the faults in their own stance as well. McGrath knows Christians. He gets Christians. And he shows just how wrong, pure and simple, wrong is Dawkins' view of us.

Read the book -- he says it all so much better than I could. But I will just mention his excellent treatment of the argument that goes roughly: religion has caused untold harm, therefore it is bad, while science is pure and rational and enlightened and therefore good. Both have caused good, both have caused bad. If Dawkins was right then the officially atheist Soviet Union really should have been the Earthly paradise that its propaganda claimed -- yet it gave the world the gulag and, because bad science (Lysenko) was more ideologically acceptable than good science, millions starved in a famine that could easily have been avoided. Yet Dawkins doesn't cite this as a good reason to abandon all science -- because, of course, it isn't, any more than the Inquisition is a good reason to give up on faith.

It would no doubt surprise Dawkins, in the unlikely event of his ever hearing of me and/or caring what I thought, to learn that if I want to find out more about the world in which we live, I will choose science every time. And if the findings of that science seem to say that my understanding of some matter of religion is wrong, then I will (I hope, happily) change my understanding of religion. Human understanding, in science and everything else, is all over the place, but the facts remain true.

Creeping age

When I woke up this morning I was already older than Dr Who, James Bond, JK Rowling and our vicar. I'm now older than the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Poo.

Christ 1, Artemis 0

Thoughts occasioned upon today's Daily Bread reading ...

Acts 19: 23-41 tells the sad tale of a riot stirred up in Ephesus against St Paul by the silversmiths who made souvenir idols of the goddess Artemis (or Diana). And presumably other gift shop tat -- you know, tea towels, Clarecraft models of the temple, erasers with a picture of the goddess, tasteful stuff like that. The concern of the rioters was that this new Christian message would lead to a decline in Artemisism, "the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited, and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty."

Fast forward 2000 years to Buckfast Abbey, Devon, where one of the sidechapels is paved with marble taken from the ruins of the great temple at Ephesus.

Altogether now: "o-one nil, o-one nil, one nil, one nil ..."

Why Myrtle moans

The first two Potter films were a good way to kill a couple of hours but, frankly, unnecessary -- they were just picture books of the stories that Rowling told so much better in print. The third film made a valiant effort to be a better film, with a redesigned Hogwarts and a greater use of imagery and mood. Unfortunately its rejiggery of the story led to a few key omissions that made the actions of the characters unintelligible if you didn't already know them.

But the fourth film ... ah, the fourth film gets it right. It's the first Potter flick I can honestly recommend. The closing scenes of Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire are pivotal to the entire series -- the point at which both Harry and the story come of age, the point of no return. If the film didn't get them right then the previous 2 hours would have just been a waste of space. And the film gets them exactly right.

This was the first book where everyone was saying that someone died. I remember getting to that point and thinking, "is that it??" I couldn't even remember who the victim in question was from previous books. But it grew on me -- even if he was just a supporting character, I found that the casual brutality of Voldemort said more about sheer evil than any kind of speechifying. Death leaves raw bleeding gashes in people's lives -- which is what Rowling was trying to show, and which is what the film does so well too. It also helps that young Radcliffe really is quite a good actor. This is the most emotion he's had to show yet and he does it well.

I'm also certain that no one, four years ago, would have expected a scene of Moaning Myrtle lap dancing Harry in the bath ... And did anyone else spot a slight inconsistency in that Harry valiantly tries to conceal his modesty with bubbles, but at one point they both duck under the surface where presumably everything on offer is on view?

Ow ow ow pain ow

And ugh, solpadeine tastes foul.

Somehow, driving home last night around 10.45, I managed to pull something in my neck. Or push it. Whatever -- I can no longer turn my head more than a fraction of a degree to the right without pain. In fact, having it slightly to the left is the most comfortable position.

Still, after a restless night it gave me the opportunity for a little DIY sensory deprivation. A good hot bath, with all but my face submerged so that the warmth could reach the afflicted area. Having your ears underwater is just weird. Every glug and gurgle of your internal system -- and there's a lot of them, before breakfast -- is magnified out of proportion. Even the ones you can't actually feel happen. Strange whoops and howls and rattles trail off into the distance, like the cries of the night wildlife in a low budget drama set in Africa or some exotic far off planet. And at one point there was a distinct knocking, like the little man who lives under my bath was rapping on the ceiling and asking me to keep the noise down. Then I remembered I don't as far as I know have a little man who lives under my bath and I put it down to sleep deprived hallucination.

This happens just as the mouth ulcer that was bugging me for most of last week -- at the corner of my lips on the left, just where the canines meet -- goes down. How easily we take for granted a body without pain ...

The road goes ever on

Not far from the office there is a small, potholed little road that doesn't even classify as a B, called Milton Hill. The main road, the A4130, takes you down the eponymous hill to the A34 and the Milton interchange. Milton Hill (the road) turns east off the main road, then takes you down the hill, parallel to the A4130, to a modern housing estate called Milton Heights. I've never quite been sure why Milton Heights is there. It seems to be an attempt by Didcot to plant a colony to the west of the A34, a bit like Europeans planted small towns in North America as a basis for claiming the entire continent for their king/queen/Pope.

But I digress. Half a mile away, the other side of the A34, is the village of Milton. You would never think to connect the rutty little not-B-road and Milton High Street, still not exactly the Appian Way but much better looked after and an important access route to the industrial powerhouse of Milton Park.

But get this. I was looking at an old, early 1900s map of Oxfordshire, and Milton Hill and Milton High Street are actually the same road. In the old days, to get up Milton Hill, that was the route you took. Then some clown built the mighty A34 and the entire middle section of the road was replaced by the grandeur that is the Milton interchange.

But it takes a lot to kill a road. It has been reduced to two unconnected stubs, but it's way older than the A34 and I have no doubt will outlast it. Perhaps our civilisation must fall and a new one arise, but I am sure that road will one day be connected again, a vital arterial route in the heart of Oxfordshire, and generations as yet unborn will be heading up and down Milton Hill, perhaps looking (if they have time) at the sad remains of the A34 and wondering at the people who built it.