Voicing My Opinions

I don't usually watch talent shows but I make an exception for 'The Voice' - well it's singing! Watching the live final tonight, if Leah McFall doesn't win ... I think questions should be asked in the House (of Commons) - they ask less contentious, crappier questions on a daily basis.

However, for Matt Henry to be first of the finalist out is a complete travesty. His staging, performance, emotional engagement with his song, vocals - just everything - was brilliant.  I'm struggling to find an explanation as to why he didn't apparently garner enough votes to keep him in the final three.  Other than the explanation given by someone on twitter: that the British public wouldn't know talent if it set fire to its arse.

Honest to God, however good Andrea and Mike are (and they ARE good), would the majority of people really prefer to pay good money to go see a Country and Western singer (albeit probably the first British one) or an Irish Eva Cassidy-alike, both of whose performance styles are predictable and non-physical, or a soul man who lives every note with passion and physicality or one of the most unique voices you're likely to hear?

Up Pompeii

I've just been to see 'Pompeii Live', the British Museum's live broadcast event from their current exhibition 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum'.  Excellent.  Several of my favourite people gathered together in one place at one time and being fascinating.  Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Mary Beard, Bettany Hughes ... even Georgio Locatelli, who had baked a loaf of bread based on a carbonised one found at Pompeii.  Not only did he explain the 'name stamp' on the Pompeiian one as being similar to the identifying marks found on loaves baked even today in public ovens in Sicily, but he also came up with an explanation for the shape of the Pompeii loaf.  It was like a very large 'cottage loaf'': round, and seemingly made in two parts with the lower half larger than the upper and a kind of groove around the middle.  His interpretation?  The groove was there to tie a piece of string around the loaf once cooked in order to carry it home more easily.  Genius!

It's a strange thing that the everyday lives of these people who lived almost two thousand years ago seem so similar to our own, and yet so very different.  The commonplace ownership of other human beings as slaves, and their background omnipresence in every aspect of the life and activity of the family and household.  And yet, unlike other slave owning cultures, Roman slavery was surprisingly fluid and mobile, with former slaves rising to high ranking positions in society once freed.

It was also, at times, a very moving experience.  Having examined in great detail the wall paintings, from the garden room in The House of the Gold Bracelet at Pompeii, we then met the family who had lived there: parents and two children who died together hiding under the stairs as the pyroclastic flow of superheated gases hit the town.  Finally, we were shown the gold bracelet found with the remains of the woman and after which the house is named.  Whilst I'm sure that the connection between all three will be clear in the exhibition, somehow I doubt that it will be as evocative and emotive as live transmission managed to convey.  Really very touching.  And a poignant reminder, if  we still need it after two major tsunami events in the last few years, that a rich (on many levels) society can still be wiped out in a matter of a few hours.

Anyway, loved the live event and the way the experts, including the exhibition's curator, fleshed out the bones (quite literally, in the case of the skeletons and body casts) of so many of the items on display.  Looking forward even more than ever now to seeing it all in person in a couple of weeks!

Target Practice

There's a woman on the television using air quotation marks.

I want to shoot her.

Advertising Standards

Here's one of those annoying 'targeted' adverts that sully the right-hand margin of your FaceBook page.

Is 60 the new 30?

   What is she on? You will never guess the crazy trick that makes her look half her age.





Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a picture of Geri Halliwell, formerly Gobshite Spice or something?  She's only about 40, surely?  Perhaps it's someone's idea of quasi vigilante justice for having given her daughter a name like Bluebell.

The utter bollockness of those adverts, though, never ceases to amaze me.  One memorable one was claiming to have a 'cure' for belly fat, and advertised using a picture of a young woman in a leotard and leggings with a very big belly.  It was a lady doing yoga and she was clearly  heavily pregnant lady, and not fat at all!  How do they get away with it?

They also seem to think for some reason that I live in Milton Keynes.  I don't, dear reader.  I don't. Heaven only knows how they came up with that notion.

But, more important that any of that ... how to I get my left-hand margin back to where it aught to be???

News From The Hen House. Again.

Time, I feel, for a bit of an update.

Sadly, Anthony Quail is no longer with us.  She (as it turned out) was playing in the garden at his fosterers.  And then she wasn't.  All anyone could find were a few feathers ... pointing in the direction (if feathers can point) of a passing Sparrowhawk.  Oh well.

Chicken Dinner, my gorgeous, lovely cockerel has now left us and gone to live in Winchcombe where a mixed flock of chickens and bantams were in need of a fine fellow to look after them.  Step up, Chicken Dinner.  He's been declared "Soooooooo gorgeous" by his new owner and incredibly tame.  This is because he was too much of a twat to dance out of range like the girls did when it looked like I was threatening to try and pick them up.  No, instead he got all defensive and cocky and danced into range ... and got scooped up for undignified cuddling. Ha!  Anyway, it's good to hear he's settled in well and is much admired.  But then there's much to admire about a boy who looks like this:

In a happier vein, Amelia Nugget's foster chick continues to do well and is growning up to be a very big girl (yes, she too has turned out to be a she.  Hurrah!).  She's gone from this:

At a day old.  To this at three weeks old:

Four weeks old and able to reach the dizzy heights of the back of the seat in the arbour:

At five weeks, and still looking like an as cute as a button fluff ball of a chick:

To being nine weeks old and almost fully into her adult plumage:

Amelia Nugget has been a splendid mother and finally got herself back into laying condition a couple of weeks back, so we've had a good supply of bantam eggs. Until today, when she's holed up in the nest box refusing to move.  She and I are going to have to have words tomorrow.  I can't cope with another eight weeks of broody chicken-ness again.  One things for certain though, there'll be no more hatchings going on!

Mad Scientists

So ... some scientists somewhere have decided that women may evolve out of going through menopause as it's no longer of any use to them.

This is rooted in the 'grandmother hypothesis' that suggests women evolved the menopause and stopped having babies right through to the end of life, as other mammals do, as a survival strategy.  By not competing with their own children for resources for their respective babies, it gave the grandchildren, and thus the shared genes, a greater chance of surviving and continuing through subsequent generations.  So far, so reasonable. In which case, I'm really not sure where the advantage to women in back-tracking down this particular evolutionary road might be.

I can see why a small number (overall) of privileged women might see it as a benefit to extend their reproductive years beyond the current biological limits.  Some, of course, already do, and that's another soapbox for another day.  But I can only view the possibility of having babies velcro-ing themselves to ones support stockings or having to use ones zimmer and emergency help cord like a lion tamer's chair and whip during 'the terrible twos' as some kind of dystopian horror.  The idea of mother and child bonding over the shared use of incontinence knickers is just not right!

Besides, most women I know relish the all too brief space available in their handbag between Tampax* and Tenalady*.  I can't see us voluntarily giving that up for anything.



*Other brands of ladies unmentionables are also available.

Poncing Around The Countryside With A Daisy Behind My Ear ...

Today's post is all poetical.  Hence the title.

Last night, I went along to BlueGate Poets open mic at Lower Shaw Farm in Swindon.  Lovely setting, lovely people, lovely evening.  And I was brave.  I actually read some of my work.  And people were nice about it.  So it was all good.

Today, in celebration of that fact, I have written a small piece of nonsense for my lovely chum Miss Lucy Loquette. I've done it in fuschia because I think it suits her.  Hold on to yer hats.  This is it:

Miss Lucy Loquette

A gorgeous coquette

And one time soubrette

Played a mean clarinet

In a small kitchenette

Whilst I made vinaigrette.

It was, surely, Kismet!

Well, it amuses me.  Hopefully, it amuses her, too.  

Google-eyed In Disbelief

Margaret Hodge, chairperson of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has called Google's defence of its current tax avoidance arrangements "brazen".  An interesting choice of word.

'Brazen' - an adjective meaning bold and without shame.

Hmm.  Who else do we know whose defence of familial tax avoidance arrangements could equally be considered "brazen": hypocritical even? No!  Surely not?!

To Quote Bugs Bunny ...

"I dream of Genie, she's a light brown hare".

Well, I don't actually dream of genies.  Or hares.  In fact, it's only in the last couple of years that I've consciously recollected any of my dreams other than ones that were disturbing enough for me to wake myself up from them (I think that's a facet of 'lucid dreaming' - something some people pay good money to learn how to do, and I can do it for free.  Go me!) Anyway ...

Last night, after consciously stopping a weird dream about strange people outside my house, which wasn't my house but was - if you see what I mean - and my mother weilding a large piece of garden trellis in defensive preparation, I dreamt several lines of utterly compelling poetry then woke up.  And promptly forgot it.

The way my mind runs things, you'd think I'd know something about it ...

A Book At Bedtime (3)

This time, it's: "Letter To A Christian Nation" by Sam Harris.

It's billed as a hard-hitting rebuttal of religious fundamentalism and 'blind faith'. So basically we can sum it up as Atheist points out to American fundamentalist Christians where they're going wrong, and it's as dull and boring as every other ‘atheist points out the flaws in, largely, Judaeo-Christian belief’ book.  In this apparently interminable argument, it all seems to boil down to: “What I believe is right and what you believe is wrong”.  Which reduces it all down to playground level and, by association, then devalues the reasoned points in either argument (and, yes, there are many).

I do wonder whether any of these impassioned - some might even say uncompromising - anti-religion authors have actually managed to ‘turn’ any but a small number of individuals away from their faith(s).  I can quite see that they have been very successfully preaching to the already converted; and have probably managed to crystallize, or simply verbalise, the arguments that many more have been having with themselves. But have they ever really hit home amongst the audience they are apparently addressing?  I see no evidence that great swathes of Christians have had a neo-Damascene revelation as a result of their arguments, so I have to conclude not.  Perhaps they need to try a different tack.

Polemical atheism is as wearisome, to me, as its religious counterpart.  The totalitarian slant of “all religion, and everything in it, is bad” is the crude approach of the mindless crusader.  Who amongst us has the right to condemn something that brings comfort to those whose lives are rooted in poverty, hardship, misery and pain: for whom daily survival, rather than, say, being published, is a major triumph?  Certainly not those who live in relative ease as part of the intelligentsia,

and whose argument against religion and for non-belief/science is too academic for the vast majority to engage with.

To be fair, Harris manages largely to steer away from the rabid invective of the more zealous of his brethren in non-belief.  And he does have the grace to concede that some religious belief is benign or, at least, less malignant in his view than Christianity (Jainism seems to rate well for its doctrine of non-violence at least).  He puts forward well-structured arguments against the basic tenets of Christian belief and the fallacious claims of conservative and fundamental Christianity to be holding the moral high ground in terms of compassion, goodness and doing good in the name of God: to wit, his dismantling of the Christian anti-abortion argument in America.  I do think he rather veers into unhelpful mudslinging against the Catholic Church when it comes to the discussion on limbo, though.  And I find the tone in sentences such as: “The cure for obstetric fistula is, as it turns out, a simple surgical procedure - not prayer” snide and condescending, which strikes me as rather self-defeating when it’s aimed at the very people he’s trying to reason with.

Let me make it clear, I have no religious belief and have no drum to bang on behalf of religion(s).  But neither can I find it in myself to support the dogma spouted by Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins and the like.  And deny it as much as they will, Atheism has its dogma just as much as any religion.  Similarly, it has its fundamentalists: Richard Dawkins being the first amongst them (and anyone who can propose the Huxleyesque notion of removing children from their parents at birth and raising them in an environment that is hermetically sealed against religious belief or any other intellectually corrupting influence must, frankly, be several pegs short of a full clothes line).  Still, leaving aside one or two flaws in his own argument, Harris' book just leaves me, once more, shaking my head in despair because it always seems to me that the hard-core of atheism overlooks some of the most basic facts about human nature. 

Despite millennia of growth and progress in human understanding, the vast majority of us alive at any given point in our history believe in some esoteric force greater than ourselves.  Mankind has a desperate, deep-rooted need to understand the world around us; to create some form of belief system to explain it.  There seems to be an innate need in the human species to seek patterns and order where none, in reality, exist.  Which might explain why, with the decline in religious attendance (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Christian religious attendance) in this country, and others, came a rise in ‘Alternative belief systems’: Scientology; Kabbalah; paganism; even the belief in Faeries.  There should be a strong message for the atheistic die-hards there: when conventional religions fail to provide them with answers, rather than turn en-masse to non-belief or to science large numbers choose, instead, to turn to some other equally non-scientific, requiring-the-willing-suspension-of-disbelief, faith system.

I’ve touched on this already but when a person’s life is little more than a daily struggle for survival; when hideous, irrational events are visited on people without, seemingly, rhyme or reason, the vast majority of us are simply not hardwired in a way that will allow us to take a dispassionate view of the horrors we are having to deal with.  Many, many people simply cannot rationalise what they have lived through, or live with on a daily basis, sufficiently to recognise that nothing more than pure change had any part to play.  And maybe, just maybe, clinging to the belief that there is a better life to come is what makes it possible for some people to live through the one they have without going mad. 

I also feel that many of those who advocate scientific over religious belief forget that religion, for many, is about more than simply faith.  It’s about the ‘warm fuzzy’ feeling of having a sense of belonging; about being part of a wider community.  Aside from at a rather cold intellectual and academic level, science doesn’t have that to offer – and people need it.  More so now, I think, than ever before.   For many, the network of support, security, advice, assistance, and the sharing of values and culture that the traditional extended family unit provided has virtually disappeared. It’s been replaced instead with more individualistic and consumerist values. These, in turn, seem to have fuelled increased feelings of dissatisfaction, alienation and general unhappiness, coupled with a greater striving for more material possessions to somehow fill a perceived void in our emotional wellbeing.  A cold alembic does about as much to make us truly deep-down happy as a brand new pair of expensive designer shoes.  We are a social species and religions taps into our most basic cravings for group inclusion in a way science and shopping can never do.

More than that, I can’t help but feel that were all religions to be swept away overnight, we would find something else around which to draw our tribal lines.  It seems innate.   All the wars and peacetime atrocities that have been perpetrated in the name of religion really have all been about one thing: power.  Religion has been appropriated as the moral justification to support aggression and rapaciousness.  The fact that science is rooted in logic and not faith does not insulate it from being just as easily expropriated to sustain the worst of human desires and ambitions.  The evidence that this is happening daily is all around us.

It does seem incredible and even scary that the majority of people living in the most powerful nation on earth believe Noah carried dinosaurs on the Ark; that  the Bible is the word of God wholly unadulterated by personal or socio-political bias on the part of those who recorded said ‘word’, and should be the sole determining factor in how we conduct our affairs (including suitable punishment for those conducting extra-marital ones); and that in the game of religious Top Trumps, the God of the Christians outranks all others.  But, in many respects, it was ever thus. 

Those who led the charge for the Protestant Reformation can’t have viewed enormous power in the hands of people who believed in Purgatory, or who supported the sale of Indulgences, with equanimity.  And let’s not forget that even in the Late Middle Ages, significant numbers still clung to the belief that the earth was flat.  We make progress in understanding and belief in some areas, only to find new arenas for debate.  Whatever faith system prevails, mankind will find ways to subvert it to its own malign causes.  It comes back to our seemingly inextinguishable need to affiliate along clan fault lines.

Personally, if I have a ‘clan’ in this sense – and I’m not sure that I do – then it is that which has room for the likes of Alain De Botton.  Although I’ve yet to read it, I bought his book ‘Religion for Atheists’ when it was first published on the grounds that he recognises that some religious faiths, at least, have a great deal to offer in terms of their understanding of the importance of community to our mental wellbeing.   And he seems to manage to do so in a good-natured fashion, without being deprecating or demeaning, to boot.  I’ll let you know when I’ve read it!