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I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t an atheist. Although there have certainly been times (pretty much my entire life up until the age of about eighteen) when I would never have described myself as one. I would have said I was a non-practicing Catholic, if you’d asked me. On forms, I would have ticked the Christian box. But really, looking back, I can’t remember a time when I actually properly believed in any God.
I was christened a Catholic, in Venice, but mostly to appease my very Catholic grandparents, rather than because it was something my parents felt strongly about. Both of my parents were raised in the Catholic tradition, and both of them had abandoned the Church before I was born. They were married in a church, but again I suspect grandparental influence. Nevertheless, growing up, I owned a Bible. I went to a Christian school from the age of 7 to 11 (again, not because of my parents’ beliefs but because it was a better school than the other, secular, one in our district). We sang hymns every morning in assembly; we said Grace before lunch every day (For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful); I sang solos of a religious nature in school concerts; I put my hands together and bowed my head at the appropriate moments. I never questioned any of it. It was just what we did.
But I never really believed any of it either. If I thought about God at all, it was in the same way as I thought about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny – a nice story told by grown-ups, but not really real. Not really. At night, with my childhood fear of our house burning down as I slept, I hedged my bets, praying ‘Dear God, just in case you are real, please don’t burn down our house tonight. I will read a chapter of the Bible every night if you promise.’ I got through the whole Bible that way.
I can’t remember the first time I described myself as an atheist, but I do know that the word has always felt right to me. Like trying on several pairs of jeans, none of which work, and then eventually finding a pair that fit perfectly. In recent years the word has become quite a powerful one, and there are prominent atheists out there (Richard Dawkins I am looking at you) who seem to have turned not believing into a religion of its own. I am not one of those atheists. For me, the word means ‘Yeah, that religion stuff. It’s not for me’. I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in life after death, I don’t believe in angels. What I believe in is the wonder of nature, and that good will always triumph over evil. My faith is in the ultimate goodness of the human spirit.
Most of the time I don’t think about this stuff at all. This post is inspired by a post on Susie Bright’s journal, in which she asked readers to tell their ‘coming to atheism’ story. And I realised, fingers hovering over the keyboard, that I didn’t have one. I have never ‘come to atheism’, it has always just been there. My hackles do occasionally rise, when I hear people say that a person who isn’t religious must as a direct consequence be without morals, because hey! I am a good and moral person because I damn well choose to be, not because I fear eternal damnation if I’m bad. Isn’t that better? And when George Bush (Sr.) announces that atheists are neither citizens nor patriots, even though I make no claims to citizenship or patriotism of his country, I am still appalled.
But, like I said, most of the time I just bimble along in life, trying to be good, trying to do the right thing. Just like most religious people do. Life isn’t so very much different, over here on the Godless side of the fence. I never lost my religion, because I never had any to lose, and the older I get, the more I realise: that’s OK with me.
WHY am I so socially inept when it comes to babies? It is genuinely a mystery to me. I am competent in a wide range of social situations; I can talk to strangers, I can network, I can make small talk at parties. Heck, even public speaking doesn’t overly worry me. When I was studying in the States I used to give presentations on safe sex and healthy relationships. I have put a condom on a carrot in front of a lecture theatre full of college freshmen. I did it in front of frat boys! Let me tell you, when it comes to public-speaking-baptisms-of-fire, that ranks pretty fucking highly.
And yet, and yet, put me in front of a baby and all I can do is grin inanely, stare off into the middle distance, and hope that someone will come along and take it away soon. My boss’s girlfriend brought their new baby into the office today, which is why I have recently been made freshly aware of my complete inability in this area. The baby was introduced to me, I gazed at it with a panicked expression on my face, tried to figure out a way to politely turn around and go back to work before I said something unspeakably ridiculous like ‘oh he has lovely, um, ears!’ and then breathed an enormous mental sigh of relief when some other, vastly more capable colleague came over and began doing all the right things – making silly faces, stroking hands, admiring the cute little outfit, asking for a hold… WHY CAN’T I DO THOSE THINGS? It is like I have some kind of disability!
It’s not that I don’t like babies. I do! Babies are great! I hope to have one some day. (Maybe even more than one, but I make no commitments until I’ve found out for myself just how much labour hurts). I babysat as a teenager, perfectly competently. I used to know how to do this. I used to be able to entertain a baby perfectly adequately. But now, the thought of prancing around foolishly in order to incite gurgles just fills me with squirmy socially-anxious dread, and my panicked brain just sends me confused messages like ’scritch it behind the ears, they like that!’ And I have to remind my brain, ‘no brain, that’s cats.’
I appreciate that writing about a frustrating experience in Ikea is the blog equivalent of the mother-in-law joke, but, you know what, I spent a wretched evening there on Saturday and the only way I’m going to get over it is if I’m allowed to purge a little here. And anyway, I like my (potentially possibly maybe) future mother-in-law. I don’t want to make jokes about her. One day she may even figure out how to work the internet, and then I’ll really be in the shit if I made mother-in-law jokes on this blog. So, ranting about Ikea it is.
Anyway, it is all, in a roundabout sort of way, my (potentially possibly maybe) future mother-in-law’s fault that we had to go to Ikea in the first place. See this year, we announced we were staying home for Christmas. I hate putting the cats in jail the cattery. I hate having to decide between my parents and J’s parents about ‘who gets us’ for the 25th. And I hate the way all the little bows and ribbons I put on Christmas presents get squashed in the car. So, this year, we’re staying in London for Christmas. But in order not to cause too much familial strife, we announced that anybody who wanted to was welcome to come and join us. And unfortunately, pretty much every single one of our relatives has taken us up on the offer.
This year, we will be hosting J’s parents, J’s brother, J’s aunt, and my mum for Christmas. And, right now, the only table we have in the whole flat is a coffee table. Hence the need for a trip to Ikea. See, we don’t have a dining room. So our plan is to turf the coffee table out of the living room for Christmas lunch, and set up a folding table and chairs in there. A nice tablecloth and some seat cushions, and nobody will know the difference. We figured two of these would do perfectly.
So, on Saturday night we drove over to Ikea in Wembley. Except first we had to stop over at C’s to borrow her car because J’s car is a sporty number with a teeny boot and the back seats don’t fold down, and there was no way we’d get the table into it. So, in C’s 11-year-old Volkswagen Polo, which drives, bless it, like it has a hairdryer under the bonnet and no real connectivity between the steering wheel and the actual wheels, we bimbled up to Wembley, whereupon I left J in the car with a copy of The Economist, and headed into Ikea alone. The reason I left J in the car is because past experience has taught us that J can’t cope with Ikea. At all. And the only way we could ensure that he didn’t end the evening with a criminal record, following beating some hapless Ikea employee around the head with a comically-named kitchen implement, was for him to never actually set foot in the store at all.
Alone, I ventured into the store to track down a folding table. And, mirabile dictu, I found one without too much trouble. I paid for it, called J in the car park, he brought the car round, we loaded the table into the back, and headed for home. Except I (stupid stupid stupid) said to J, ‘I’m a bit worried, because the picture on the box only shows legs, no table top, so I hope it’s in there.’ And J (curse him) said ‘Oh, we’d better stop and make sure before we leave.’ So we stopped, and opened the box, and of course not only was there no table top in there, there was also only one set of legs, even though the website clearly advertised it as a ‘2 pack’.
Cursing Swedishly, I went back into the store, and tried to explain to a hapless Ikea employee that I needed a top to go with my legs. Much confusion followed, because according to their computer the top should have been in the box, so maybe it was a packing mistake. But no, because all the other boxes were similarly table-top-less. Several hapless Ikea employees later, I was beginning to see the temptation of taking a comically-named kitchen implement to the lot of them, criminal record be damned. And they were clearly a bit fed up with me as well, because in the end they just told me to ‘go to aisle 7′ where there were lots of table tops, and ‘pick one you like’. It turned out that the one I liked was the cheapest one, and I liked it because it was the cheapest. Twenty minutes later, we loaded a second set of folding legs and two £7.99 table tops into the protesting Volkswagen, and headed for home.
And of course, the bastard legs don’t fit the bastard table tops. And of course J has now decided that, screw it, he’s just going to go buy a big slab of MDF in the size we want and attach one set of folding legs to it. Which means, naturally, that we have to go back to Ikea next weekend to return the two table tops and the extra set of legs. Or, in other words, if we had just left Ikea the first time and I had never gone back in, everything would have been fine. Sodding Ikea. Sodding tables. Sodding Christmas.
NEXT year, we’re going away for Christmas, and we’re not telling ANYBODY where.
If you’re American and you’re reading this, then, I’m sorry, but I hate you. It’s nothing personal. I’m just jealous that you don’t have to go to work today AND you get to gorge yourself silly on bizarre concoctions like sweet potato with marshmallows, while I am stuck at my desk with a bowl of rice crispies and a heaving in-tray. So, yeah, just for these 24 hours, I hate your guts. I’ll love you again tomorrow though, I swear.
Anyway, I could sit here and gripe all day but that wouldn’t be fun for anybody (except, possibly, me) so instead here are some things I’ve liked recently. I think you would like them too. Yes. You.
I am so completely in love with Stephen Fry. I would totally leave J for him if he ever asked me to (this is, luckily for J, unlikely). Honestly, it’s a toss up between Stephen Fry and Kermit the Frog for who I love most in the whole wide world ever (do you think a psychologist would have something to say about my always wanting unattainable men?) And Stephen Fry’s blog is like everything I love about the man in lovely written form. I tried to pick a paragraph to quote here to illustrate the sheer brilliant wonderfulness of it, but I can’t, it is all sheer brilliant wonderfulness. Every word. Go and read it now.
Michael Palin: Diaries 1969 – 1979, The Python Years
OK actually I am quite in love with Michael Palin too. I think probably my Who I Love Most In The World list goes something like:
First place (tied): Stephen Fry and Kermit the Frog
Second place: Michael Palin
Third Place: J
And I guess at least Michael Palin is both straight and not a puppet frog, but he’s still fairly unattainable, what with the fact that he has no idea of my existence and also he’s almost but not quite old enough to be my Grandad. Oh yeah, and he’s married too. So I don’t think J really needs to worry. But anyway, his diaries are great. They’re just exactly like he’s speaking to you right off the page. And the writing is so utterly engrossing that when you’re reading it and something distracts you, it’s jarring to look up and discover you’re not actually sitting in a BBC studio watching Monty Python being filmed in the mid-1970s, but you’re standing on a crowded tube train and everybody is looking at you funny because you just laughed hysterically to yourself. Not that that’s happened to me, or anything.
This has been linked to all over the place but just in case you haven’t seen it, Show off your MAD VOCAB SKILLZ and donate rice to the United Nations AT THE SAME TIME. This is crazy addictive, by the way, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. But every word definition you get right generates 10 grains of rice. Don’t ask me how it works, something to do with ad revenues. I don’t care, all I know is after about half an hour I couldn’t get my vocab level above 46, and the maximum possible score is 50, and I am not going to be able to rest now until I’ve beaten the damn thing. Also, did you know that poikilothermic means ‘cold blooded’? Now you do. Consider that a freebie. You’ll need it at around level 36.
And finally, I am also currently enjoying Long Way Down, the motorcycle adventures of Ewan McGregor and pal. But if you want to read about that you’ll have to go over to Pop Vultures because I’m talking about it there today.
Morning! I still have the lurgy – horrid cough mostly, but also sore throat and general feeling of malaise. I was off sick from work most of last week but back in the office this morning, not particularly because I am better but just because I have too much to do. Being a grown-up is rubbish.
But! Look! I have thrilling news! Our kitchen is finished! Actually, not completely finished, because we still need to get our electrician in to install the spotlights under the cabinets, but it is pretty damn well near finished!
Remember this?
Now it looks like this!
Also, wait, is that the truth out there?
No! It’s a mood kettle!
Mood kettle is jealous. Mood kettle heard you used another kettle today at work. For the next week mood kettle is going to prepare your water at just slightly below boiling point, in a passive aggressive revenge attack. That’ll teach you for boiling around with other kettles. Bitch.
Yesterday J’s parents came down to London for the day to take us out shopping for a new dinner service. It didn’t help that I was feeling grotty and bad tempered, and that Oxford Street was so packed with tourists and Christmas shoppers that even on a good day it would have reduced me to a homicidal rage within ten minutes. As it was I was feeling fairly stabby before we even got out of the car. It didn’t get better. Because of course J and I were never going to agree on a dinner service. We never agree on anything to do with home decor. Although since we moved in to the new place in June, we have got the fine art of disagreeing with each other and then reaching a compromise down to about a three minute conversation:
I love this!
Really? I hate it. How about this?
Ugh! It makes me want to vomit just looking at it.
Oh OK. What about this?
Well, I don’t totally loathe it. I like this one a bit better.
That one’s OK.
Right. Quick. Let’s buy it.
See? It’s a system. It works for us. But with J’s parents along for the ride the system fell apart somewhat, because they a) wanted to find something we both loved and refused to accept that that was never going to happen, and b) kept suggesting things we both hated. After dinner services had been seen and rejected in John Lewis, House of Fraser and Selfridges, we accepted defeat. Or, more accurately, J realised that the murderous glint in my eye was being directed specifically at his close relatives and wisely stepped in to end proceedings.
We went home dinner-service-less. But everybody was still alive, so it wasn’t all bad.
I had yesterday off work with some miscellaneous malaise, mostly characterised by the world going all floaty and a slight fever. And I still feel like ass today, so here, to cheer myself up as much as anything, is a round up of amusing things I have taken photos of recently.
Hee! I can’t decide which amuses me more. The fact that this bank is referring to what is, essentially, a letter box, as a ‘device’, or the fact that they called it an ‘anti-pilferage device’. Pilferage!
Proper granary bread. Because don’t you just hate that stupid imaginary granary bread? That shit pisses me off.
This graffiti makes me grin everytime I see it. It’s like the ‘artist’ originally started off with a carefully thought-out message (fucking the corrupt police) but then just decided to start writing all the bad words he could think of seemingly at random.
“Ha ha ha. I said scum bags! And pussy! I am well hard.”
And finally, here is a picture of my cat Molly, because sleepy furry cat belly is the best medicine.
I feel better already.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
This post is a couple of days late, but I wanted to take the time to write it properly, and I didn’t get chance on Sunday, and then work was too hectic yesterday. So, here we are on November 13th, not the 11th, and the poppies on the war memorials up and down the country have probably already begun scattering away in the wind, and already we are moving on. Remembrance Sunday done, time to think about Christmas.
Remembrance Sunday always featured large when I was growing up. Not because I come from a military family – far from it, but because I grew up in West Yorkshire, and if you grow up in West Yorkshire, you spend a good chunk of your childhood in a brass band. You just do. It’s non-negotiable. It’s a tradition that goes back to the mills and the coal mines, but unlike them it has stayed on, passed to the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the former miners and mill workers. I joined Hebden Bridge Junior Band when I was seven years old. I played the cornet, because at seven it was the only brass instrument I was strong enough to pick up.
And it was the cornet that was required, on a chilly November Sunday each year, to stand up in silence, with the traffic stopped and the flags lowered, and play the mournful notes of the Last Post. Cornets have valves for making different notes, but for the Last Post, you don’t use the valves, you use only your lips to sound out the tune. The pressure is enormous. One bum note and hundreds of people will be jarred out of their two minutes of respect and remembrance. One slip of the lips, and it’s ruined, and you don’t get another chance for a whole year.
So, when I was growing up, Remembrance Sunday really only meant severe performance anxiety to me. I fretted about it for weeks in advance, spent the whole morning beforehand wanting to throw up, and got through the notes of the Last Post on adrenaline alone, hugely relieved when it was over. It was only as an adult, once I had outgrown the band and Last Post duties had passed to some other unfortunate, that I began to see that the day was about something more.
I owe my life to the Second World War. My grandparents would never have met if my English Grandfather hadn’t been stationed in Venice where he bumped into my Italian Grandmother at a ball. It sounds trite to say that I feel gratitude to all those dead soldiers, because they died so that I might live. Except that, trite though it may be, that’s exactly how I do feel.
I would like to say in all honesty that I would make such a noble sacrifice, that I would die for my country. And maybe, if I genuinely believed it would make a difference, I would. But what about the men and women who died not knowing it would make a difference? Who gave their lives for their country even though from where they stood it seemed futile and meaningless? They did it anyway. And yes you could argue they didn’t do it willingly, because they were drafted, but hey, they did it anyway.
They did it anyway.
I owe my life to war, but many many thousands owe their deaths to it. And now, looking back, I feel honoured that in a small corner of Yorkshire, for a few cold November Sundays in the early nineties, I got to play the Last Post for them.
The title of this post is not a joke. The pinnacle of my achievements this weekend was the purchase of a mood kettle. For serious. Our kettle has moods.
You read that? It’s the first stainless kettle to mood light your kitchen. I can just imagine the shit that went down at the head offices of rival kettle manufacturers the day this baby hit the production line.
“Those bastards at Breville have beaten us to the mood light punch. And it’s fucking stainless! Better step up production on the mind-reading kettle. They won’t see that one coming. Any chance we can have it out before Christmas?”
Incidentally, I would totally show you pictures of our kettle displaying its many moods, but J has gone away to Copenhagen for a week on business and he’s taken the memory card for the camera with him (but not the actual camera – wtf sweetheart?), so I can’t. Which is a real shame because I was hoping for your input on what all the various moods might mean. It appears the good people at Breville didn’t include a handy guide, you see, which means we have quite an enigmatic mood kettle.
I walked into the kitchen this morning and the kettle was bright red, so either it was an angry angry kettle, furious with me for heartlessly filling it with water and forcing it (against its will!) to boil. Or it was a loving, tender, romantic kettle, deeply enamoured of me for allowing it to fulfil its kettley destiny by making my morning tea. You see the confusion. Last night it was a kind of greyish-purple, which I have decided is a sign of mild kettle ennui. Is boiling water all there is? It expected so much more from life.
Once, just once, it would like to have a try at making toast.
Ugh. I am having a bit of a morning. I was working late last night. Or rather, I was attending a glitzy event for work, which was like working really because it’s not like you can just slump in a corner with a strategically-placed bowl of nibbles and chat with your friends, which is my modus operandi at glitzy non-work events.
I got into bed at about 1am, and lay awake for an hour or so having weird half dreams in which weird shit happened that I can no longer fully recall, but I did eventually doze off properly. Then this morning J’s alarm went off at about 6.15, even though I had been granted a special work-authorised lie-in and wasn’t expected at the office until 10am. But J is incapable of getting up and ready quietly and in the dark, and I am incapable of staying asleep through all the lights being on and J stomping around the flat tripping over the cats. So basically, I was up at 6.15 too.
After J left I dozed off again, but not properly, since his last words to me before he went out the door were ‘don’t forget the painter’s coming round at 8.00.’ So I lay there, half asleep, and I kept having one of those weird waking dreams in which I thought I heard the painter come in (he has a key) and start work, and I would get up to say hello to him and make him a cup of tea, except my eyes wouldn’t open, so I would say to the painter ‘Hi would you like a cup of tea? I would make you one but I can’t see and I might burn my hands on the kettle’.
And then I would realise I was still asleep after all, but I could still hear the painter in the background, so I would get up again to say hello to him and make him a cup of tea, and the same thing would happen again, and I would realise again that I was still asleep. I went through this five or six times, driving myself crazier each go-round, until eventually my alarm went off, I woke up properly, and realised the painter wasn’t even there yet. A relaxing night’s sleep it was not.
When I did eventually get up and get out of bed, the painter actually did turn up for real, and then I was forced to scamper through my morning routine and get out of the house as fast as possible because our painter is a lovely lovely man but he could talk for England (I could sleep for England, by the way, if anybody is wondering about contenders for possible future Olympic events) and he is not remotely put off by the fact that you may be behind a closed door. Even if you are behind a closed door and showering, he will carry on conversing with you but just yell a bit louder to make sure you can hear him.
So, in short, late night last night; crap night’s sleep; lovely work-sanctioned weekday lie-in thwarted: grumpy grouchy Plattie this morning. Tonight we are going to a wedding in a boat house on the Thames near Victoria. I’m sure it will be a wonderful and delightful evening. But will it be as wonderful and delightful as an early night with a good book?
I suspect perhaps not.
