Our Hilarious Monarchy

The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish by Christopher Hitchens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One day early in the morning I was feeling ever more broody as I mooned around the landscape of my Kindle. I’d been clicking and sniffing between books I could read next, in that horrible in- betweeny mood in which I found myself. I’d just finished reading the second volume of an excellent trilogy and I needed a break, a breather, a period of recuperation and recharge before plunging into the explosive third volume and it was in this ‘need a short, sharp break’ frame of mind that I browsed my 5-way button to The Monarchy ~ A Critique by Christopher Hitchens, for no particular reason apart from the need for a total change. By the time I’d reached the end of the free sample I was chortling away as I hadn’t done for many a merry month and rarely have I clicked that ‘buy’ button with such eagerness. ‘After all,’ I reasoned to myself, ‘£1.49’s just over what I paid for a pint of IPA draught at the local when I moved to this village 30 years ago.’

So without further ado let’s take a look at the The ‘News’ presented as if it’s set in stone. As Christopher Hitchens (1949—2011) writes: “We know that this strident, bombastic noise is a subliminal appeal to think of ‘News’ as part drama, part sensation and part entertainment”. The beauty of this opiated numbing show is that you never know whether your trip is going to be good or bad. The same thrumming monumental brass rhythms will tell us either that the Queen Mother has got a fish bone lodged in her throat, or that we’ve just severed diplomatic relations with Iraq. YOU are left to decide which item carries the greater weight.

Already long, our Prince's face lengthens
even more as the news worsen

Chris (Yes, let’s hob-nob for a bit!) invites us to look at absurdities like the ‘Investiture’ of Royalties which to most of us mean a lot if we don’t think about them, but examined closely they amount to absolutely nothing. Just look at this on the myth of the ‘Investiture’: “The official guide to the ceremony dissolves in contradiction here, because it says of the sacral moment that it comes from Zadok the priest, who anointed Solomon as King of the Jews, and that the ceremony follows the old Saxon ritual, and that the moment is to be accompanied by the singing of Handel.”

The more we bring our pet-theories into the light, the more threadbare, nay mendacious our propaganda seems. ‘Invisible earnings’ may indeed be comforting dummies to suck in times of crisis, but in these days of costing everything up why do the powers that be seem incapable of coming up with an estimate? And while we’ve revelling in contradictions, what exactly is this ‛special relationship’ which we apparently hold with the USA? — What does it amount to? In these days of costing everything up, listing and categorising every aspect of our lives, which boxes does it tick? And what exactly is the ‘unseen hand’ of the money market?

The End of This Post
Back-chatter :
End, what do you mean, ‘End’? Monarchies and Dreams don’t have an 'End'. They dissipate in the morning mist when the sun rises, only to re-form with the coming of the night. Monarchies keep folks dreamy, happy ready to chase the rainbow to its end.

Think Barbara Taylor Bradford, man, finish with all this Woman of Substance fantasy and begin to Hold That Dream. Never mind about subscribing to The Sun or Mail, just keep to the news for your daily fix. Suck the curate’s egg of the ice-cream cone, starting with the sickly raspberry ripple and the tang of the lemon twist. Lick your way through the chilled artery-clogging fat of the ice cream and don’t stop until you reach the sickly nugget of treacle at the end. Worry not, you’re in the Ukay. Just keep taking the tablets and watching The News.... Dang, dang, Dang 16/08/12 13:51:10 Stop Press (Dissected) (1) The Duke of Edinburgh has been admitted to hospital because of a bladder infection. (2) This is just a routine and it’s giving no cause for concern. (3) He’ll be in for a few days he’s receiving intravenous antibiotics. In juxtaposition to this we’re asked to also know that: (a) The Duke is 91 years old and it’s always serious at this age. (b) (Invisibly: He obviously can’t swallow tolerate tablets, hence the anti-bio’s) (c) This is the 3rd time he’s been in hospital in the past 9 months, the first time being before Christmas when he was admitted because of a heart problem 20/08/12 06:24:36 The Duke is having to spend a fifth day in hospital. Remember it’s (a) Just routine and nothing to worry about. (b) He isn’t allowed any visitors (Only one telephone call from The Queen so far) (c) If the stay extends to a sixth night, there will then bee ‘cause for concern’ Despite their apparent longevity, (Long-faced Prince) Monarchies are really a transient and ephemeral phenomenon which are lent their solidity solely by the careful presentation of choreographed images flashed onto our retinas, much in the way that ‘movement’ in a movie is really a sequence of still images. The images presented here now need to be frozen in aspic, at a time when very little appears to have happened. Let’s keep in that way before the routine of the fifth day lapses into the concern of the sixth. If it gets to that, matters will be a little more serious than the tragedy of our Duke missing The Boxing Day Shoot of Christmas 2011. Hurried Royal Notes scribbled frantically as I try to close this blog entry (again). I blink my eyes awake after a late night, first carefully checking my limbs and hair to see whether I’ve woken up as Nicholas Witchell. Fortunately I haven’t, as my hairs have no trace of gold or red in them, they’re just showing me an agéd grey and I’ve woken up as me, the same me as I’ve always been:

Will The Duke have to miss the
Boxing Day Shoot?

(** Prince Philip has been taken to Papworth Hospital rather than a local cottage hospital. Rather. Rather. What on earth do they mean “rather”. There is no RATHER about it! Cottage hospital are totally incapable of inserting stents into a coronary artery. Papworth Hospital is the main, the only hospital in the area which is capable of performing the procedure.) STOP PRESS: The Queen’s corgis have got into a scrap with Princess Beatrice’s dog Max. I don’t think I can stand any more of this. Off with them, all you get out of my sight! Mad Hatter, I call to you. Please make yourself welcome in my house any time you want...


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Killi’s Very Civil Ceremony ~ A Sweep Through Time

 About 20 years ago, in some middle of nowhere track in India I met an eleven-year-old boy who said his name was Killi. Killi attended (from time to time) the local village school and his favourite lesson was called... Truant. “It’s simple,” he explained to me, “School is about learning things, and when I go to class I learn nothing, apart from the fact that the teacher either isn’t there or doesn’t do anything when he is. Even were he to beat a boy one day, we’d all have a little entertainment spiced with our resentment, but more often than not he can’t even be bothered to do that. He just tells us to carry on studying.”

Not Really 11

It wasn’t long before Killi’s lost the isolation of his Jungle adventures. “After all” added a school-chum, you need to have a buddy with you in case of snakes.    “And I suppose my parents would miss me” said Killi in reply. “More like they’d miss someone lugging jars of water from the village tap at 3.00” a.m. grumbled his mate Vibhu. You know  how we stand in there in all weathers keeping each others’ places in the queue before grabbing a bit more sleep until we go to attend classes that aren’t there!” Killi simply didn’t reply to this, but he welcomed the company nonetheless, and soon there was a gaggle of four or five boys playing hooky as they explored the jungle nearby.

In the course of time, Killi and his mates would come back with many things, mostly Nellikai or wild gooseberries, their ragged pockets bulging with the hard green fruits along with string and unprotected razor blades. These became a currency with the boys as they emerged from the forest, sharing them round, but only with kids who were prepared to do other work in return. I swear these children had several sets of eyes. They’d shared and bagged the prestigious job of pushing the wheelchair, so I would use this free form of locomotion to explore as much of the mountainside as I could with wheels permitting. It wasn’t long before I’d scream out NIL (STOP!) because I’d seen a wiggle of movement under some plant and ordered them to bring it to me. Astonishingly, most boys were terrified of some of the creepies like bristly devil-headed caterpillars, advising me to be careful and not to touch. Persuading the diábolo to leave its stalk and wander along my hand while I blew mock kisses in its direction. That raised my social status even more, and I must admit I much enjoyed the power which was heaped upon me.

It wasn’t long before my room was filling up with bugs, millipedes and inch-worms, not to mention the odd sweet-jar which contained soil and ant lions, and occasionally a flower-pot snake or two. As the specimens poured in I soon realised that I was biting off more than I could chew, or indeed feed. And what is more I saw that all this gathering and collecting “for John” had very little to do with me until the small runnel of regular absenteeism from the village school turned into a river. John would be well and truly in the spot-light if it was traced to him!

It Was Like This: Thanks Getty!

Matters came to a head one day when I found that unasked, a boy had cycled a further 12 miles into the depth of the jungle and came pedalling furiously back.  He presented me with a live chameleon he had captured there and thought I’d like to keep it as a pet. A live chameleon was something I’d never met face-to-face before; I’d always wanted one as a child and now my wish had been granted in a quite unexpected way. Even so, I had a strange surge of emotions sweeping through me at the moment; Deeply touched that a boy had cycled so far on my behalf and that he’d correctly guessed what I would love. At yet at the age of 44, I’d also learned that the creature would be thoroughly accustomed to the deeper jungle world which was his home that very morning. After giving the boy a hug of thanks, I told him that it could not be.

On opening the little box, the lizard had done its utmost to convince me that it was a Fischer-Price Plastico-rubbery toy which had pipe cleaners embedded in its limbs. The creature seemed frozen & dead, but after leaving it alone a little it started to move jerkily and roll those googly eyes. The boy pleaded for me to keep it but I explained through my friend that back home in Tiruvannamalai the conditions were totally different. There wasn’t the humidity and the greenery there, and even if he lived he would never find a mate. Without his jungle cover he’d soon become a target for a hungry crow and rat, or perhaps he’d simply die to have his flesh picked off by ants. I think that of all the futures I saw, that was the saddest possibility.

Killi With Brother Ramana

And then one day he decided to clean my floor with a brush, push the chair even more and make my breakfast. Jungle adventures were left behind as time’s broom swept us all on. I missed him sorely when I returned to England I determined   I would bring him, with his brother, to help me throughout the year. Inevitable difficulties followed, the most formidable of which were the Home Office Dragons who made it an almost forgone conclusion that entry to the UK would be referred. “Highly unlikely” was the term used in their letter to my MP.

Surprise followed on from surprise. Who knows what happened in the intervening years. Somewhere along the road that chameleon lizard must have traded places with an axolotl. In the course of leaving the watery humid jungle a veritable dragon has emerged to begin his life as a fully-fledged UK Citizen.

Killi's UK Welcome Ceremony.

 In the picture, in front of the portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, we see Killi with the High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire, Penelope Walkinshaw as well as Councillor John Powley. Killi has just received his Certificate of Nationality.

"YOU" ~ It Had Its Moments

You by Joanna Briscoe

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Sat Jul 28 09:06:41 BST 2012
    I need a little bit of intrigue in a book to give me the energy to read through the following acres of prose. Unless the prose itself has such entrancing properties that I can wallow in it at any and any point, I invariably I need bribing. I'm a fish who's too lazy to swim any distance unless somebody's dangling a worm on a hook to pull me through, and the first little worm was the snippet that a school-girl has a raving crush on the English master, whilst her mother  carries on her first lesbian affair with the English master's wife. What a delightful set of ingredients, I thought. With those items loaded into my trolley it wouldn't matter too much at the checkout which plot I selected from the range dangling on their hooks for to select. If plots were sweets, Maltesers would guarantee a thoroughly enjoyable read.

     However, I noticed that the Publisher was Blooms bury and they are a firm with whom I feel that (despite the fact that they do the Harry Potter series and are consequently swimming in far too much money) you can hardly go wrong. My prayer that Maltesers would be the dangle-plot for Ms Briscoe to adopt were swept aside as I looked for something more obscure. I needed a sweet I quite enjoyed as a child but wasn't really sure about. Something like marzipan which I convinced myself I would love once I'd become a proper grown-up. Newberry Fruits sprang to mind. They were a sugar-crusted jelly in lime, orange and lemon and they had a liquid centre which gushed all over your tongue when you bit into them. For some reason I fancy I'd plumped for those. Or had they been pre-selected for me?

     I slogged and groaned over this book, wading heavily through the chick-litty e-pages, which stayed drearily parochial at their best or navel gazing at their worst, not that I have anything against deep contemplation. But you are, I feel, to come to an inner peace, love and understanding when you do that.

     It dragged on and on. I kept looking for something else to do, something tantalizing to read, and managed to get myself thinking, madly, that if I left it alone for a bit it would somehow have magically have read itself on a bit further. The Siren whispers advised me to dump it as there was plenty else for me to enjoy. But I don't do that, and at the time I firmly believed that 'proper readers' simply didn't do it. Nonetheless, by the time I’d reached the halfway mark I was as teed-off as ever and sorely tempted to dump it as 'failed to finish'. When a book does that with me it's in serious trouble.

     It perked up quite a bit at the 60% mark and I sailed through the batch of pages, deciding that I was quite enjoying it really, and that it had reached the 'all forgiven' point, as long as it kept up the pace and didn't slacken its hold. Something more needed to be dangled on the hook now, and I demanded a diet of shrimps followed on by succulent high fat low cholesterol Dublin Bay Prawns.

Unfortunately there was no tasty diet. In true seventies style I found I was munching my way through a slice of wholemeal mung-bean pie, and all I really got was he ocular equivalent of jaw ache. As the story dragged its fuggy hash fog, I began to care little what or who Cecilia’s mystery baby was and by the end of the novel, despite the occasional description which held me captivated, I found that I simply couldn’t care less.


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Our Gay Son

Tue 03 Jul 2012 17:43:26 BST>
I spent a day feeling stunned after the completion of The Assassin's Apprentice, followed by a day of shivers as I underwent withdrawal symptoms because the story had come to an end. The following day I pointed my quivering finger at The Royal Assassin and pressed "Buy Now" followed by "View Downloading Items" and as the cyberdrug infused its way into my system, the shaking stopped, my head cleared, and I was able to carry on with normal conversations and think about my next meal. After that, I left-clicked and selected "Remove from Device", fancying it was one of the notes I used to write to Father Christmas scrawled on tissue paper sucked up the chimney flue and making its way to the Cloud.

I felt unable to handle the events held in that shiny new volume today. I needed an interlude, a little break, a light visual to fill a corner of my hungry mind, but only a corner of it as I needed to increase my capacity for handling tension and pain before moving on to volume two.

17:43:50

Just over 50% of the way through. I'm finding it so honest, frank and open and I have rarely nodded and underlined as much as I have in this Kindle book. It surprises me. It delights me, and by that I mean it has my undivided attention. By 'delight' I don't mean enjoyment in the normal sense of the word, but I go with it. I suffer with the author's pain of what he must have undergone when his youngest son, whose life hung by a thread when he was very young, came out to his parents as gay.

Exactly why I am enjoying so much I find much harder to understand. I am not a Christian struggling with my sexual orientation and I haven't jettisoned Christianity because of its stance on homosexuality. I jettisoned most of it at about the age of twelve when I attended a Billy Graham meeting which our school took some pupils to see. I went through curiosity, because I wanted to see angels appearing, or Pentecostal flames lighting upon the heads of the ones who were called. I tried, oh Lord how hard I tried to go along with what Billy was saying and to believe whatever he was saying, and when he got that glazed but somewhat sweaty look upon his face and asked for true believers to "Come Forward", I asked to be pushed up to the front, not because I had felt anything, but I because I wanted to see what would happen next.

What happened next looked very promising to me: dapper smart young men in crisp suits circulated amongst our select gathering and asked us, individually whether we believed in Jesus Christ and accepted him as our 'Savior'? I was very tempted to believe in Billy's pitch, especially if it meant moving a world with such pretty young men, but true to what my Dad had told me — not to fall for anything without checking it out a bit more first — I replied that I wasn't really able to 'believe' on the results of listening to one preacher. (Privately I saw Billy Graham more as a show doll with plenty of make-up on his face, and little if anything beneath that). One of the cute little men then opened his Bible and said, "Perhaps you'd like to read what The Bible says about unbelievers, John?" and there it all was, held out for me to read. Hot fiery nasty stuff which would happen to me if I didn't believe in the Bible. If there was any prefabricated self-contrived bubble about this meeting which I'd made up before attending, it had now burst, pretty young men and all. I suddenly found the entire affair highly amusing, and I couldn't stop myself from smirking. With words like "My God is much bigger than all that" I turned my back on Christianity, and to this day I have never really turned back.

Until Now. This little book, this painful writing out of the author's deep hurt and anguish, has caused me to think again. A little. The author spent 40 years of his life serving as an evangelical Christian, with many years spent in Africa, and there is no doubt that he was thoroughly sincere and that he achieved a lot of good, working as a missionary during that period in Uganda.

The pain started when the author's good wife got her contractions early and was rushed to hospital. She gave birth to twins, one of whom died and the remaining child, a little boy, was premature, his life held in the balance. So he was much cherished.  It was in his late teens, flanked by his heterosexual and highly supportive brother and sister, that he came out to his parents as gay, which was, understandably, a tremendous shock to his parents.

Finished!

At the conclusion of this short book I could not but be struck by the resonant similarities yet very marked differences in our two spiritual 'journeys', —as everyone seems to be calling their life stories these days— : The similarities were days spent in the tropics, but the author had a far worse time of it than me, as he witnessed more beatings and deaths than me as well as undergoing a severe bout of malaria. Mr Robert-John spent years as an evangelical spirit-led Christian who perhaps included hell fire threats in his eagerness to make conversions along with possible episodes of homophobia, made in the conviction (as he saw it) that homosexuals were an abomination in the eyes of God. Strangely enough, I had also decided by the time I reached puberty that I too was an abomination under the Christian ethic, but this belief had nothing to do with sex, as I didn't know at the time what the Christian stance on homosexuality was. I just remember believing that I was chaff because I was an unbeliever, or simply not good enough for Heaven. By the age of nine I had decided that because I didn't believe in the way The Bible wanted me to, I was chaff [Insert pic] . I was the useless husk that surrounds the good grain, and The Bible told me that I was going to be burned in the fire†.  I decided that there had to be a use for chaff. If it was no use to The Bible and its adherents then perhaps there was another religion which found a good use for chaff.

Paper and straw dolls came to mind, but I was sure that cleverer minds than mine would have more ingenious ideas.*
Years later I grew into the way of Hindoo-ism learning to forge a pathway through to Yoga and the East, and it wasn't long before I discovered the health benefits of bran. I then found a much bigger God than the bigoted bipolar trucculent brat of the Old Testament. He was unbelievably great, so great that he didn't live in some far off inaccessible corner, so hard to reach that so far the only two persons have made the trip: Jesus Christ and The Virgin Mary. He was so great that you couldn't even limit him to being inscribed with a name. Yet this bigger God was closer than we can imagine, 'closer to you than your jugular vein', to echo the Qu'rân (50:16).

My early truancy from the Christian Faith led me to the pathless path and I was often bruised and scratched by the thorns I encountered along the way. The author of this book was far more secure in the tenure of his faith. Yet the world in which he lived and moved and had his being was uprooted when his son came to him and his wife on Boxing Day 2005 and announced that he was gay. Prayers and therapy were not tried because the son had no intention of going along with all this evangelicism. The young man was flanked by his fully supportive heterosexual sister and brother when he came out to his parents, so Mum and Dad found themselves rather isolated.

SURPRISING OUTCOMES
I was surprised to learn that the outcome of the author's journey was that he became a reluctant atheist. I wasn't disappointed. I have no problem with atheism whatsoever and I find it an excellent position to start. Sometimes I wish I could be one myself, but I'd only feel more able to do that when I find someone who's able to explain to me what they mean by atheist and what they mean by God. And when I find a few definitions which match up.

The other surprise, to say it again, was that I found myself enjoying the book as much as I did. I was after all just taking a break from the spell which had been cast upon me by volume I of The Farseer Trilogy and I wanted to read something on the small side, but different in subject and mood. Certainly I didn't expect to get quite as deeply sucked into the author's cathartic story.

~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~
*In my maturer years, I learned that chaff can be turned into bricks for fuel; it can make a wonderful insulating material. Furthermore my doctor prescribes me little sealed sachets of chaff (ispaghula husk to mix with water and take after my meals. It keeps me nice and regular and I feel fighting fit. I just *knew* that chaff was a valuable commodity indeed).

† Matthew 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire

Our Gay Son ~ I Was Gripped

Our Gay Son: A Christian Father's Search for Truth by David Robert-John

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



  Tue 03 Jul 2012 17:43:26 BST>
I spent a day feeling stunned after the completion of The Assassin's Apprentice, followed by a day of shivers as I underwent withdrawal symptoms because the story had come to an end. The following day I pointed my quivering finger at The Royal Assassin and pressed "Buy Now" followed by "View Downloading Items" and as the cyberdrug infused its way into my system, the shaking stopped, my head cleared, and I was able to carry on with normal conversations and think about my next meal. After that, I left-clicked and selected "Remove from Device", fancying it was one of the notes I used to write to Father Christmas scrawled on tissue paper sucked up the chimney flue and making its way to the Cloud.


I felt unable to handle the events held in that shiny new volume today. I needed an interlude, a little break, a light visual to fill a corner of my hungry mind, but only a corner of it as I needed to increase my capacity for handling tension and pain before moving on to volume two.


17:43:50


Just over 50% of the way through. I'm finding it so honest, frank and open and I have rarely nodded and underlined as much as I have in this Kindle book. It surprises me. It delights me, and by that I mean it has my undivided attention. By 'delight' I don't mean enjoyment in the normal sense of the word, but I go with it. I suffer with the author's pain of what he must have undergone when his youngest son, whose life hung by a thread when he was very young, came out to his parents as gay.


Exactly why I am enjoying so much I find much harder to understand. I am not a Christian struggling with my sexual orientation and I haven't jettisoned Christianity because of its stance on homosexuality. I jettisoned most of it at about the age of twelve when I attended a Billy Graham meeting which our school took some pupils to see. I went through curiosity, because I wanted to see angels appearing, or Pentecostal flames lighting upon the heads of the ones who were called. I tried, oh Lord how hard I tried to go along with what Billy was saying and to believe whatever he was saying, and when he got that glazed but somewhat sweaty look upon his face and asked for true believers to "Come Forward", I asked to be pushed up to the front, not because I had felt anything, but I because I wanted to see what would happen next.


What happened next looked very promising to me: dapper smart young men in crisp suits circulated amongst our select gathering and asked us, individually whether we believed in Jesus Christ and accepted him as our 'Savior'? I was very tempted to believe in Billy's pitch, especially if it meant moving a world with such pretty young men, but true to what my Dad had told me — not to fall for anything without checking it out a bit more first — I replied that I wasn't really able to 'believe' on the results of listening to one preacher. (Privately I saw Billy Graham more as a show doll with plenty of make-up on his face, and little if anything beneath that). One of the cute little men then opened his Bible and said, "Perhaps you'd like to read what The Bible says about unbelievers, John?" and there it all was, held out for me to read. Hot fiery nasty stuff which would happen to me if I didn't believe in the Bible. If there was any prefabricated self-contrived bubble about this meeting which I'd made up before attending, it had now burst, pretty young men and all. I suddenly found the entire affair highly amusing, and I couldn't stop myself from smirking. With words like "My God is much bigger than all that" I turned my back on Christianity, and to this day I have never really turned back.


Until Now. This little book, this painful writing out of the author's deep hurt and anguish, has caused me to think again. A little. The author spent 40 years of his life serving as an evangelical Christian, with many years spent in Africa, and there is no doubt that he was thoroughly sincere and that he achieved a lot of good, working as a missionary during that period in Uganda.


The pain started when the author's good wife got her contractions early and was rushed to hospital. She gave birth to twins, one of whom died and the remaining child, a little boy, was premature, his life held in the balance. So he was much cherished.  It was in his late teens, flanked by his heterosexual and highly supportive brother and sister, that he came out to his parents as gay, which was, understandably, a tremendous shock to his parents.



  Finished!


At the conclusion of this short book I could not but be struck by the resonant similarities yet very marked differences in our two spiritual 'journeys', —as everyone seems to be calling their life stories these days— : The similarities were days spent in the tropics, but the author had a far worse time of it than me, as he witnessed more beatings and deaths than me as well as undergoing a severe bout of malaria. Mr Robert-John spent years as an evangelical spirit-led Christian who perhaps included hell fire threats in his eagerness to make conversions along with possible episodes of homophobia, made in the conviction (as he saw it) that homosexuals were an abomination in the eyes of God. Strangely enough, I had also decided by the time I reached puberty that I too was an abomination under the Christian ethic, but this belief had nothing to do with sex, as I didn't know at the time what the Christian stance on homosexuality was. I just remember believing that I was chaff because I was an unbeliever, or simply not good enough for Heaven. By the age of nine I had decided that because I didn't believe in the way The Bible wanted me to, I was chaff [Insert pic]. I was the useless husk that surrounds the good grain, and The Bible told me that I was going to be burned in the fire†.  I decided that there had to be a use for chaff. If it was no use to The Bible and its adherents then perhaps there was another religion which found a good use for chaff. Paper and straw dolls came to mind, but I was sure that cleverer minds than mine would have more ingenious ideas.*


Years later I grew into the way of Hindoo-ism learning to forge a pathway through to Yoga and the East, and it wasn't long before I discovered the health benefits of bran. I then found a much bigger God than the bigoted bipolar trucculent brat of the Old Testament. He was unbelievably great, so great that he didn't live in some far off inaccessible corner, so hard to reach that so far the only two persons have made the trip: Jesus Christ and The Virgin Mary. He was so great that you couldn't even limit him to being inscribed with a name. Yet this bigger God was closer than we can imagine, 'closer to you than your jugular vein', to echo the Qu'rân (50:16).


My early truancy from the Christian Faith led me to the pathless path and I was often bruised and scratched by the thorns I encountered along the way. The author of this book was far more secure in the tenure of his faith. Yet the world in which he lived and moved and had his being was uprooted when his son came to him and his wife on Boxing Day 2005 and announced that he was gay. Prayers and therapy were not tried because the son had no intention of going along with all this evangelicism. The young man was flanked by his fully supportive heterosexual sister and brother when he came out to his parents, so Mum and Dad found themselves rather isolated.



  SURPRISING OUTCOMES
I was surprised to learn that the outcome of the author's journey was that he became a reluctant atheist. I wasn't disappointed. I have no problem with atheism whatsoever and I find it an excellent position to start. Sometimes I wish I could be one myself, but I'd only feel more able to do that when I find someone who's able to explain to me what they mean by atheist and what they mean by God. And when I find a few definitions which match up.


The other surprise, to say it again, was that I found myself enjoying the book as much as I did. I was after all just taking a break from the spell which had been cast upon me by volume I of The Farseer Trilogy and I wanted to read something on the small side, but different in subject and mood. Certainly I didn't expect to get quite as deeply sucked into the author's cathartic story.


~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~
*In my maturer years, I learned that chaff can be turned into bricks for fuel; it can make a wonderful insulating material. Furthermore my doctor prescribes me little sealed sachets of chaff (ispaghula husk to mix with water and take after my meals. It keeps me nice and regular and I feel fighting fit. I just *knew* that chaff was a valuable commodity indeed).


† Matthew 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire





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Mr Oliver, Will You Offer Some More?

I know that people think they know what you're doing, Mr Jamie Oliver, and I'm pretty sure that you think think you know it too, but I'm not sure that you've ever sat to one side to think about what you're doing with food and what you feed into the minds of people who follow you. Yesterday morning I saw you with a knob of celeriac in your hand. I believe you were making some kind of salad with it. You said (words to the effect) that it was too much bother to peel it finely, so you took a sharp knife to cut the skin off in slices, in the process leaving convex lenses of celeriac flesh lying on your work bench, all neatly coated with skin.

As a child, Mr Oliver, I can remember my mother opening the pedal bin to inspect the potato, apple and carrot peelings. Nothing was usually said, but if she found more than two or three  slitherets of vegetable flesh adhering to the skin, she would summon the scullery maid, and I have only a brief memory of one girl who made the same mistake twice. A shame, because she had such a lovely character.

We were brought up  to be very conscious of food waste, the value of food, and the efforts which people make to bring it to our table. Mr Oliver and his ilk however, seem to trivialise it, belittling the food which brings them light and life, thereby turning the entire subject into a comedy. He likes to whack it, bung it, wham it, sling it and then 'drizzle' oils and dressings over his creations. He draws twirls, twists and shapes it upon his plate and presents it more as a picture than a plate of honest tucker to fill you up and send you on your way.

Whether you want to hear it or not, he effuses about all the spices and flavours intermingling in his marinades, whereas in my day the judgment of the food was left to us. We were plate-fed dishes of food which we could spoon or fork into our mouths as we wished, at our own rate. As we ate our meal, cook would not also indoctrinate us with vacuous notions about what was going on within the dish before we ourselves had a chance to decide what we thought of the meal, and whether we wanted to know more. Satisfied silence gave her all the comfort she required.

Which would you rather have? To be presented with a dainty little picture on a plate and fed a lecture about what you might discover if you ate it, or given the meal to enjoy at your own rate, while cook stepped back to see if you were enjoying it? Supposing the eater were to show delight and end up asking you what had gone into it, and how you prepared it? Did you make the soup this morning, or did you do it the previous evening and left it all gel together in the fridge overnight? Did you fry the spices first and then grind them, or perhaps you ground them briefly before crushing them  between stones before frying? Perhaps you put them in a muslin cloth and twisted them like washing from a boiler tub, squeezing out the juices between the pores of the cloth? And if you did that, what did you do with the remaining pithy pulp?

    Mr Jamie and his kith and kin are young, too young perhaps, to remember hardship, scarcity and need. Yet as surely as the sun will rise upon the morrow morn, so also will those hard times visit us again. I wonder if Mr Oliver, with his slapdash sling-it, bung-it, whack it attitude, has made plans for those times, if not for his own sake, at least for the sake of others whom he feeds.

Who Vadis, Mr Rathbone?

Inherited Danger by Brian Rathbone

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I keep on thinking that there must be different ways to write a review Of late I've  been reading a slew of books, then taking a ½ day breather before moving onto the next one. Reading interests me much more than the chore of writing about what I've read and besides, I think a book's spell lasts better if you don't keep on about it too much. You want to bask and submit yourself without communicating it all. So I've been reading the first volume of trilogies, and then leaving them well alone. After a while I'll recap on what I've read before asking myself what I thought about it all in retrospect, and whether I want to read further.

One such first volume was The Call of the Herald by Brian Rathbone.

After The Call of The Herald had been finished I thought well yes, It's OKay. The question for me, of course, is will it stay in mind? And that is something which only time can tell. Sometimes you really enjoy a volume "at the time", but in retrospect it can go flat. Sometimes it does well in holding itself together as time progresses, and sometimes is grows and grows, until the ineluctable force pulls you back to itself again.

The Call of the Herald didn't do that for me, but I did enjoy the character of Catrin, the dirty grubby farm-girl who got herself into trouble with the Mr Bumble of a teacher; a nasty boy makes trouble, and Catrin is blamed and expelled from school where she ends up getting herself into even more bother. Plastered in horse-shit, things are never Catrin's fault, but she always gets the blame. However her foot may always be planted in the squish of the barn yard, but her spirit connects with the stars when she finds that the presence of comets triggers magnificent powers within her being, slapping down injustice and righting wrongs.

  

In Inherited Danger, the story continues. It's taken new twists and turns and our fondness for most of the characters in the first volume usually deepens. One thing however which annoys me in Rathbone (or indeed any writer) is when a negative factor occurs at the beginning of a sentence and the problem is all wrapped up by the time it's reached the full stop. "He didn't appear happy about her outbursts, but he supported her nonetheless." is a good example of this. After all, at this stage we are used to wildcat Catrin's explosive bursts of temper, and we're used to the presence of moderating Benjin too. It could have been reworked a whole load better, I feel. Faux pas-ey things like "You're eyes are better than mine" show a sloppiness and lack of care, and I had the distinct feeling that the author was concentrating too much on the feedback from his audience and being wowed by people "liking" stuff than in attending to the material he was writing.

   

This, I feel, is the fork in the road for Mr Rathbone. To the left is the road which follows the fans, and to the right is the desire to devote himself to the characters in the story, and to let the narrative breathe through the pores of his skin. I feel the author has strolled a few yards into the left way and is being looked after well there. He's fed and rested and he has good company. On the other path the terrain is bleaker and full of loneliness if he selects the right-hand path, where the number of fickle fans has thinned out. This is where the ones remaining assess the situation, as they watch the writing mature and it's in this group that the author may have future supporters. The mettle of the readers is tested here, and the author needs to try to avoid sentences where a problem is introduced at the beginning and ended with the full stop. He also needs to develop some of his characters a little more before he throws them away, but I think and hope he can do it.

    Having read volumes I and II for free, I'm very happy to go to pay for the third because I want to find out what happens through the actions of our heroine  Catrin and I could easily fall in love with the newly-named spirit called Prios; whether her impulses land her back in horse manure she grew up shovelling, or if the same dung will be used to make enough bio-gas to mount her on her steed and gallop with authority into the fray remains to be seen.

NB: Under the old system, this book might have acquired four stars. Under the new it's three, and it's just about clambered up to that position. The reason for this is that it's been cast into shadow by another book, in the same genre which whispered its way onto my reading device, which towers like a colossus over my life. The more I enter its world, the more two-dimensional the present one seems to be. The Dawning of Power series needs to look to its laurels.

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