There probably is no God

Back in my favourite ale house, a full year since my last visit and several years since I last witnessed The Son of an Irish Prince working his magic. Sadly he's not here today. Scribbling in my pad, I sip Victorian Ruby Mild, a strong darkish ale that is simply perfect, and thank God for it, these little pleasures are His gift, His provision.

There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

The above is the product of the Athiest Bus Campaign. You what? What pertinacious old poodle dreamt that poster up? If I am not careful it will spoil my pint. On the other hand, Lord Kitchener is staring at me from the front of the Sussex Drinker, a fine distraction from my thoughts. I need you, he says.

We used to see The Son of an Irish Prince every time we were here. The first time was with my mate Dan. Released by our respective ladies for a few hours we were catching up over a couple of pints. Suddenly the shadow of a largish oldish man loomed over us. James Duncan Lynch, he said. Son of an Irish Prince, he said, thrusting out his hand, and joining us at our table. Mr Lynch never showed any regard for pub etiquette.

Why does the poster bug me? I think it is the implication that believing in God, or at least suspecting his existence, results in abstemious old blighters stomping about moaning about the weather. It also implies the reverse, that atheists fly through life with all the abandon of an elastic band pinged across the classroom by a snotty schoolboy.

In my experience, those of my friends and acquaintances that are self-professed atheists are by far the most miserable. I'd rather be masticated by a ravenous nipple hamster than attend an atheist convention. And hey, if you're an atheist I'm not having a go at you, or saying that you're unhappy. Unless you're the one behind that poster.

We had a debate on religion with Mr Lynch once. There were five us sitting round a table when Mr Lynch arrived at our table uninvited, and invited himself. He introduced himself to the others.

James Duncan Lynch, Son of a...

Mr Lynch dragged the conversation over to religion, and then got himself all worked up.

Why are you so cross?, Pete asked.

I'm not cross, he said, smashing his chubby fists down on the table. We never found out what was angering him, but we found out an awful lot about Greek myths and poetry, which he spouted at every opportunity.

The statement itself is nonsensical, you can't really speak of the probability of God, I mean he either is or he isn't. It is not as if we have ten instances to compare (note, I cannot define "instance" without rupturing my cerebellum, so I'm not going to attempt to), four of which contain a God and a universe, and six of which just contain a universe. If that was the case then sure, you can say there probably isn't a God. But blah blah drone drone I'm not really getting anywhere this and besides, Lord Kitchener is freakin' me out.

No sign of the impious Irish Prince, or his son for that matter, and my pint is getting low - I'll probably finish it within the next few minutes. Time to go home to my lovely wife, and my beautiful, beautiful little baby daughter, who grins at me as I leave the flat each morning, bringing such joy to my soul, an indefinable joy and a wonderful blessing. I thank God for them every day.

Oh, and I've thought of a new bus poster.

The atheists are whinging again, ignore them or it will spoil your day.

Nice Nipples

A man across the carriage from me is wearing the tightest white shirt I have ever seen. The material is pulled taught round every button and the man is clearly uncomfortable, in exquisite discomfort even, writhing with enough intensity to put Uriah Heep to shame. The shirt is so small that Frodo Baggins would have given it to Oxfam and Tom Thumb would have lost sleep worrying about nipple exposure.

Opposite me is my Nemesis, a man whose daily goal is to invade my space with his huge greatcoat and massive laptop. Every day without fail he seeks me out, plonks himself in front of me, or next to me, and tries to read my paper. I fight back by holding my paper at an impossible angle, which doesn't stop him but hopefully gives him a cricked neck and eyestrain. If he wants to read a paper he should buy one.

Across the aisle is the bike freak, a man who (every day) taps away on his laptop until we reach Gatwick, before getting up to unfold his travel bike. He unfolds it using a tape measure to achieve an exactitude that would put da Vinci to shame. In fact, it does put da Vinci to shame.

Note to self, send some boos and hisses da Vinci's way.

Further up the carriage is one of the two eccentrics. I've mentioned these before in another article, but they are so brilliant they deserve to feature again. Every day they wait together at exactly the same point on the platform. One of them always carries a giant golf umbrella, no matter what the weather, which has always irritated me. I'd rather get wet a couple of times a year than lug that monstrosity around 365 days a year. He reminds me of my wife's gran, who once spent several months refusing to go outside in case she got hit by a meteor.

Anyway these chaps stand there chatting away like old friends until the train pulls up. One of them gets on the adjacent carriage and the other walks a few yards up the platform and gets on the next carriage. An unfathomable mystery. If they are such good friends why not sit together? If they want some space to read then why not just agree to read? They're mad I tell you. Sagacity, oh sweet Sagacity, where are you?

The train conductor thinks he is Clint Eastwood, swaggering up and down the aisle as if he bruised his coccyx tripping over a cat, making gruff announcements...

"There are two kinds of men in this world...sorry, Ladies and Gentlemen, got a bit carried away there, this is the 7:24 service to London Victoria, calling at..."

Marshaling my thoughts I attempt to get back to my paper, which has been woefully neglected, but they drift back to White Shirt. What WAS he thinking as he admired himself in the mirror this morning, flexing his pecks and winking at his reflection?

Is it cold in here? Nice nips?

Tempranillo (my Valentine)

Tempranillo, you make me sing
I drink you, because I am a king
I don't care what they say
Tempranillo helps you work, rest and play

Indefinable Tranqulity

The squirrel sat on the bird table stuffing its face full of nuts. An obese wood pigeon waddled around below. Indefinable tranquility. Nature at its best, a thieving grey squirrel and an overweight pigeon.

Bang.

Squirrel and pigeon flee for their lives chased by my wife's granddad, shuffling after them brandishing his air rifle.

Welcome to Yorkshire.

The long drive up was soul-destroying, although this was to be expected, with most of the trip spent on England's two worst roads, the M25 and the M1.

The M25 is the World's worst motorway, a playground for the World's worst drivers, gibbonoids who should never have been granted a license, gimpgrandchildren whose driving experience should have been halted when at the age of three they crashed their little plastic buggies into beds of stinging nettles, loathsome incompetents who inflict moral and intellectual damage on the rest of us.

The M25 is exhausting to drive on, you don't just have to be on your toes, you have to exercise the extreme levels of concentration required by a surgeon performing a triple-heart-bypass operation on a flea.

At least the flea would be anaesthetised, unlike the brainless oafs that appear out of nowhere and force you out of the fast lane with the imbecilic recklessness of a four-year-old on a sugar high.

And then there are the insouciant drivers who stubbornly stay in the middle lane, otherwise known as "road hogs" or "middle lane morons". The Highway Code is simple, keep left unless overtaking. Rather than suffering from a simple venial lapse, these canaries spend their lives cruising the middle lane, encouraging undertaking and needlessly forcing you to overtake in the fast lane. You overtake in the fast lane, only to be forced out seconds later by some gimp hitting 100 mph in a Merc.

Transit vans are the worst, pulling right up to your rear bumper in that contemptible way that only transits do, they then overtake, before cutting back across all lanes at the last moment. To be fair, it's not that surprising given that most transit drivers have the mental age of nine. To borrow from Wodehouse, if a transit van driver's brain was constructed of silk, "he would have been hard put to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.”

Fortunately I'm such a patient, graceful sort of chap, so none of this bothered me.

***

The phone rang. My wife's granddad wearily got up and shuffled over to the phone. "It'll be another bloody call abou' creditors", he moaned.

"Ah don' 've no creditors," he yelled down the phone. "Now bugger off!"

Like I said, welcome to Yorkshire.

The Empire Club (just a bit of mundane Sussex life)

Stumbling through the doors of The Empire Club with the dishevelled instability of a newborn giraffe, and finding myself in a foyer with two possible exists, I ploughed through the obvious one. Expecting the familiar smell of beer and the comforting sound of the Spurs thrashing Burnley, I was met instead by the foul stench and soul-destroying sound of the unfit, grunting and panting to trashy pop songs. It was probably an aerobics class, but I left too quickly too know for sure, it could have been anything, a Britney Spears mick-take group for example.

The other door took me to the bar.

The Empire Club is one of those random places for which there is no word to describe. A bit like a working man's club, but not quite, certainly nothing close to a pub, but can't be called a bar either. An anomaly.

It took me a few moments to spot Paul and Steve, sitting in the far corner looking uncomfortable, looking like two lads sitting in an anomaly.

I can't remember why we chose to watch the game at The Empire Club, there was some sort of connection between the club and Steve's work. I had to be signed in by a bloke called Ray, and had to pay a quid for the night. How funny is that - a quid?! I asked Steve who Ray was. Dunno, maybe he owns the place, he said.

As we sat there we were closely watched by the regulars, a motley crew of grizzly old men who stared at us with small badger-like eyes, as if we were unruly ferrets invading their hole. Old men are terrible starers, and if there is one thing they hate more than anything else it is change. Who were these young whippersnappers, destroying their same-old-same-old by simply being there?

I always enjoy seeing these two. We reminisced about old times, like when they sneaked out of the Evening Star with one of the ale festival awards, only to return it a few weeks later (in equally sneaky fashion). And the time when they got their car stuck in the stones on Brighton beach after a night DJing.

Paul is leading a colourful life, one which I'm fascinated by, though not envious of. He is spending his time flitting between here and the USA where he does youth work for a charity. Now here's the interesting bit. His charity work is self-funded, so he spends a several months back home saving up for the next trip. He does a menial job two days a week, proving a small but stable income, but the majority of his earnings come from online poker tournaments. To maintain his prolific poker activities he subjects himself to a rigorous fitness regime and healthy diet - to keep his mind sharp and prepared, never gambling if he is tired or has had a few drinks.

I sipped my precious pint slowly - precious because I was driving and it could be my only one. Arundal Gold, a fine local beer. When I left the old men glared with intent, their badger-like eyes watching from behind their Fosters. Old men always drink Fosters, which I can't respect, and can find no explanation for.

I decided to give the aerobics class a miss on the way out.

New Year's Resolutions of Indulgence

I was going to title this piece New Year's Non-Resolutions, but that little voice at the back of my head spoke up with remarkable awareness and incisive poignancy, pointing out that saying "I'm not going to give up coffee" is not a non-resolution, just a resolution. Thinking about it, it may have been that little voice at the tip of my left little toe, but these little voices all sound alike.

I suppose I could have provided a single non-resolution of "I don't know", or just "blah blah", and that would probably count as a non-resolution. But the aforementioned little voice would undoubtedly called me a coward, or worse, a ditherer, or even worse, a gimp-grandchild.

I did suggest to my wife that I could eat a Cadbury's Creme Egg every day until Easter, in celebration of Easter, but she vetoed the idea. So instead, these are my resolutions.

1) Don't give up coffee. Mind you, I don't intend to drink more coffee, or less coffee. This is just a reaction to the idea that I could give up coffee, which would be the sort of extreme asceticism that I am not prepared to be a part of, not even for Lent. Not that I partake of Lent, each year I give up Lent for Lent. I do intend to enjoy my coffee more fully, so in a way that is a sort of sub-resolution. I'm not, of course, speaking of that disgusting abomination known as instant coffee. I'm perpetually in a state of denial regarding instant coffee, preferring to pretend it doesn't exist rather than face such a gross insult to the real thing. I'm speaking of the real deal, freshly ground (yep, of course I grind my own beans) aromatic wonders of divine proportions, beautiful rooty experiences that blow your mind, reduce your risk of alzheimer's and blow your senses into a caffeinated oblivion.

2) Don't give up wine. Similarly, I don't intend to drink more wine, that would be irresponsible, and we all know that alcohol should be drunk responsibly. But I would like to drink more Rioja, and less scanky make-you-flinch Cabernet Sauvignons that I pick up because they are on offer. Some people don't like Rioja, professing a partiality to "old world" wines (by which they mean French or Italian) or "new world" wines (by which they mean powerful Australian Shirazes). Lunatics. Everyone knows that Rioja is the wine of kings.

3) Don't give up beer. As above, I think my beer intake is just about right, somewhere close to moderation. My issue with beer is that there is too much choice, and I like trying new beers so much that I often forfeit the chance to knock back an old love in favour if trying something new. But I could easily write you a list of my top 20 beers, all of which I love, cherish and have given a permanent place in my heart. So this year I would like to enjoy more of my top 20, and pay less attention to trying new beers.

Gosh, now I just have to see these resolutions through.

The BBC's subjective blatherings in the name of "news"

Sipping my pint (a Brakspear bitter if you're interested), and mercilessly beating my wife at backgammon, I was inwardly fuming. It wasn't my pint, which was delicious, and it wasn't the taste of winning, which was as sweet as ever. It was the BBC and their reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that made me fume.

The BBC's report on the conflict consisted of lamenting the loss of Palestinian lives, which was over 300, interviewing a tearful Palestinian mother who had lost two children, and lambasting Israel for their use of force. Their report, in essence, was basically saying that Israel is the big bully with guns who, consumed with blood lust, is needlessly and mindlessly blowing up Palestinian civilians for no apparent reason, apart from perhaps a bad mood and a warped desire to destroy.

I too lament the loss of Palestinian AND Israeli lives. I too am sympathetic with the Palestinian mother who lost two children. And I don't deny that the situation is dire, complex and difficult. But I'm furious with the BBC for flushing objective reporting down the toilet in such shameless idiocy, and instead going for a blatant pro-Palestine report, which will no doubt drive up anti-Israel and pro-Palestine feeling in viewers.

And listen, I am pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. But I'm also in favour of news reporting to be as objective as possible. Sure, nothing reported is truly objective, but I'd like the BBC to at least try, rather than spewing out content akin to the puerile wining of a spoilt three-year-old.

The BBC failed miserably to mention that Hamas and Israel had been observing a six-month ceasefire brokered by the Egyptians. Israel was prepared to resume trade with Gaza if the violence ceased, which it didn't. Even at the quietest period 15 to 20 rockets were still raining down on Israel each month.

The BBC failed to mention that Hamas ended the ceasefire, firing 70 rockets on Israel.

The BBC also failed to mention that Hamas deliberately embeds its fighters and weapons amongst the civilian population, hence the high Palestinian death toll. In fact, one of its own rockets misfired and killed two Palestinian schoolgirls. I didn't hear the BBC mention that in the report.

To be fair on the BBC, maybe the above were covered in other reports which I did not see. But that's the point I suppose, each report should have some objectivity, just a smidgen if you please. Is that too much to ask?

The Owl God

The Christmas service was very English. It oozed that Englishness that makes me proud, set in the most beautiful old Norman ever crafted by man. OK, I'm biased, it is our town's church, and I don't even know if it is truly Norman. I could ask my wife, who is a fountain of all knowledge and knows all about these sorts of things, but she's on the phone to her mum, so I'm just going to guess. But hey, if you're bothered - maybe you're a church historian or some geek with a book on Norman architecture - then feel free to examine the picture.

There weren't many people, which was both sad and surprising. Actually, I wasn't that unsurprised, given our nation's slide towards a culturally vegetative state, but it was sad, and I had hoped that families would have put the turkey on, and then headed to this beautiful old church to thank God for a short hour - come on, it was just an hour folks - but never mind.

We sat at the back, partly because neither of us are Church of England - or for that matter know anything about Church of England - and it was all a bit unfamiliar, and partly because little baby R was due a change and feed, and more importantly, 10am is her poo time. Without fail, between 10 and 10:30am the little one roots, gurts and poos, thrashing her little legs about with the freedom of baby that has no understanding of propriety, extorting the most incredible expressions.

The last thing we wanted was to be on the front row, reading the wrong liturgy and struggling with a gurting, pooing, thrashing little rooter. So we found a spot on the back row.

The vicar - or would he have been a curate, clergyman or priest? - was a gentle, kind, bumbling old man. He had one of those bumbling, rambling, almost unintelligible posh accents where his r's are almost w's, a kind of speech impediment that is merely the result of upper-class breeding. Hilarious to listen to. I don't think I took a single word in, I was too busy enjoying his bumbling, Boris Johnson-esk, and trying to pinpoint his accent. Canterbury perhaps.

He had a great hooked nose - I found myself imagining a caricature where his nose nearly reached his feet - and with all his robes, hood, and small round glasses he had the appearance of a benevolent eagle-god. Or an owl-god. I nearly wrote that he reminded me of an owl-god, but as I haven't ever met (or worshipped) an owl-god that would be untruthful.

We were all equipped with a hymnal and a little red book, which contained liturgy, readings, prayers and had the most infuriating page-numbering system known to man, animal or alien. At the bottom right of each page was the "real" page number, i.e. standard sequential numbering. At the bottom center of the page was another number. This was seemingly arbitrary, but teasingly sequential. For example, the real page numbers went from 1 to 55, the other numbers spanned from between 107 and 348. Those numbers are from memory, so if you challenge them, please don't be cross with me, just my memory, which at a tender age of 26 is deteriorating alarmingly.

Bizarrely, the owl-god was driving from the arbitrary numbering and not once did I find the right page. I did find the right page once, but only in time for the "Amen". Before you question my incompetence, let me defend it. Frequently we were asked to turn to, say, page 111, but I didn't have a page 111 in either numbering system, so after thumbing forwards and backwards through the book I gave up.

Maybe I had an old copy.

There were lots of nuns in the congregation, some in blue robes, some in black. This distracted me, would that have been personal preference or a simple matter of orders, or classes? I like the idea of classes, you know, when you reach a certain level of nunhood you get a blue robe. In fact, I like classes generally. Not in a discriminatory sense, though in the true sense of the word it does help you differentiate between people groups, but rather for clarity's sake. I do like clarity. It settles my stomach and makes my heart sing. Our trains have first class seas (which generally are empty because none of us can afford first class season tickets), and standard class, which are overcrowded. I'd like them to bring back cattle-class, carriages with just a couple of benches and lots of dung. Tickets would only cost a few quid and I would be there, amongst the cattle.

The choir was motley crew, apparently much depleted by winter colds, and consisting of a few children, a couple of grannies and an aging rocker. Ah yes, the aging rocker, no choir, band or group of people - no matter what the function - is complete without one.

Little R timed her morning poo to perfection. She timed everything to perfection. Quiet during the hymns, shrill wails during poignant moments of prayer and readings. I think babies know exactly what they are doing.

Anyway, it made me proud to be English.

James Bond's Alpha Romeo

The two women were wasting my time. I've always felt very protective of my time, I don't have much of it, and I have no allowance in my schedule for that kind of tomfoolery. Or any kind of tomfoolery.

When I write, it is pretty much always in my lunch break. My precious, inestimable, invaluable hour-long slot that rapidly disappears as imbeciles steal my time from right under my nose, twisting it, beating it and flushing down the toilet.

I'm an off-the-cuff writer (like most of my friends here), meaning my endless, mindless, brainless drivel just splurges out in one hit, and then lunch is over, so I post it. Not that I'm particularly proud of that, as the resulting flood of grammatical errors is enough to make a grown man cry.

Note, I use the word "writer" loosely here. When I say writer, in my head I just hear "blah blah kerfuffle blah".

So in order to make the most of my hour, I shoot straight out of work and straight to the same old same old pub, which has cheap coffee, cheap beer, free wifi and (best of all) hardly any customers.

So today that was where I headed, ready to utilize my hour with the sort of efficiency that makes me a good programmer, but destines me to be a bad listener (I try, I really do).

Bringing about my demise, two women single-handedly (or quad-handedly?!) whittled away at my hour as they dithered, faffed and fuddled their order. In the time they took to klutze their way through the simple task of buying two burgers and two drinks I could have carved an Alfa Romeo GTV6 out of a single tree trunk using nothing but nail-clippers and a teaspoon. For the sake of flippancy and continuing the recent hamster theme, I could also have carved an entire colony of hamster joy-riders. Fully seat-belted in.

For the sake of expediency, and for the sake of my diminished lunch break, here's a quick questionnaire for you.

Q) Did the two women have any idea what they wanted to eat or drink before they attempted to order?

Q) Did the two women state they were paying together using a two-for-one deal before they ordered, or did they wait until after the order had been put through the till? Or did they try to pay cash, before discovering that they did not have the correct change? Or did they try to pay separately by card, but discover that individually their costs were below the "minimum card limit"? Or did they somehow, with mindbogglingly imbecility, manage to combine the above three options into one huge mammoth-sized fuddle?

Disentangling Hybridized Spaniels

A friend has given me a lovely old book for Christmas. The Art of Growing Old, by John Cowper Powys. The book is brilliant. A magical combination of complete tosh interwoven with nuggets of truth and gorgeous prose. Seriously, this guy was a writer of real quality. I keep finding words that I am unfamiliar with, feeling like General Melchett in Blackadder when he declares that he likes the word gobbledygook and wants to "use it more often in conversation".

I thought I would share with you some of the little gems in this book. Rather unfairly, I'm focusing on the tosh. Quotes are in italics.

Now in many respects it would be true to say that just as the United States is the paradise of young women, so Great Britain, and especially England, is the paradise of old men.

Is the USA really the paradise of young women? Perhaps my American readers can shed some light on this. England certainly is not the paradise of old men. Or of young men. In fact, England is the paradise for nothing and no-one, except bad drivers, stupid cyclists, badly trained yappy dogs and Gordon Brown and his crazy tax system.

Yesterday on the train home an old man stole another man's seat when he went to the toilet. There was no room for misunderstanding. The victim's bag was on the floor, his coat hanging on the hook, and the bloke sitting in the neighbouring seat told this old gent in no uncertain terms that the seat was taken.

"There's someone in this seat," he said.

"Yeah, me." retorted the old man.

When the victim returned an argument erupted. The victim said that he was brought up to respect his elders, and that therefore he was happy to let the old man keep the seat. But he wanted to know how the old man was brought up, and whether his parents had encouraged him to steal other people's seats. The old man wasn't best pleased.

Has an aristocratic old age any special advantages, beyond the choice of wines from a superior cellar or the glow of exercising primogenital power over less fortunate relatives?

Tell you what, those sound like excellent advantages. I can't wait to be old.

Now why is it that men are able to enter more fully into the consciousness of women than women into the consciousness of men? Isn't it because men are by nature so detached from Nature that in their wise folly they flout the great Mother-Harlot and float away from her actual-factual wash-tub upon Aristophanic soap-bubbles of immemorial amusement?

Um, to be perfectly honest I have no idea. Reading that sentence makes me feel like my grey matter has been put in ancient Athenian's blender before drifting away distributed amongst bubbles blown by an ancient Athenian baby.

Good thing is, he (cough cough) helps us all out with his next paragraph.

And yet, just because these airy bubbles of a man's contemplations are, after all, made of the soap she has been using, they carry a nearer guess as to a woman's feelings than, immersed in that soapy tub, she can form about a man's.

You what?

Why are old women so much happier and so much less pathetic than old men?...The circumference of their pleasurable contemplation is twenty times larger than that of men!

I wonder what my friend Bat Canary has to say about the spacial aspects of this statement. I can a Da Vinciesk picture of a woman's pleasurable contemplation, encapsulated in a giant circle, next to a teeny weeny circle representing a man's. The thing is, I think the circumference of my own pleasurable contemplation can be pretty large sometimes, especially when fuelled by a freshly ground coffee, fine wine or a pint of creamy Yorkshire bitter.

In the pursuance of any sempiternal caprice, whether it be the breeding of spaniels, or the hybridizing of roses, or the disentangling of the convolutions of a lost syntax, an old gentleman can at once be actively selfish and the passive recipient of celestial overtones.

Tell you what, when I'm old I certainly won't be receiving celestial overtones through syntactical disentanglement. More likely, I'll still be blathering inanely on whatever digital medium is the norm, or yelling at Simon Cowell, who prances around on TV as if he had celestial overtones, but really just has a bad hair do and an overblown ego.

Having said that, disentangling hybridized spaniels sounds fun, although not particularly celestial.

Better to be a pedantic prig enjoying yourself than an unconscious simpleton tormenting yourself.

Worst of all would be to be a pedantic prig tormenting yourself.

When they [women] do abandon themselves to Nature it is, I fancy, in one or other of four ways. They can, to put it briefly and crudely, give themselves to the elements, first as possessive and maternal Envelopers; second as Narcissistic Self-Lovers; third as virginal-athletic Dianas; fourth as Men-Cozeners, or Dryads playing up their mates.

So, my dear female readers, which of these are you? A possessive and maternal Enveloper, a Narcissistic Self-Lover, a virginal-athletic Diana or a Men-Cozener?