The Sunday Ishmael 24/04/2022

  Was it genuine indignation do you suppose, driving Headgirl Sophie's truculent pout, this morning when Oliver Dowden firmly told her that Boris would be leading the Conservative Party into the next election? She had been firing a round of hard fucks into him about Partygate, Fines and Lies, but he was not one to be easily swayed by the lash of the Head Girl's whip.

Oliver Dowden, chairman of the Conservative Party - proof that politics is showbiz for ugly people.

 

Or was her disappointment, as I'm beginning to suspect, a reflection of the Beeb's game plan to have Boris replaced by a Remainer? Is there any likely successor to Bo-Jo who isn't now, or has sometime been, a firm advocate of  Britain staying in Europe? Boris won the Redwall seats on the back of his Brexit credentials - which went down very well with the industrial, northern working class, who had seen pay and conditions plummeting under the willingness of employers to keep their labour costs low by the "free movement" of European labour, and had no hope of redress from the Labour Party, which, with its preoccupation with identity politics, had abandoned the interests of its traditional electorate. 

The Beeb, an undemocratic, unaccountable spender of public money, made little attempt to project itself as objective about the European issue at the time and seems to still be hamstering away at its own agenda to rejoin Europe. Wiki defines "Fifth Column" as: "any group of people who undermine a larger group from within."
Just saying.

And then there's the one-sided presentation by an army of Beeb reporters based in Ukrainia, seemingly determined to whip up British sentiment into an irresistible demand to declare war on Russia. Andrew Marr walked away from the Sunday morning job because, he said, he was sick of having to present the Beeb's party line. The Headgirl seems comfortable with it. She had a sprightly go at Fatty Blackford today, mocking the SNP non-nucula policy.

"We just heard about Putin's nuclear arsenal and the threat from that.

Is it really the time right now to be talking about removing the Trident nuclear deterrent from an independent Scotland?"

Whoa, Sophe - although I applaud any attempt to persuade the Tribesmen to do thinking, Sophe seems to be escalating us into Nucula War.

Fatty Blackford - further proof that politics is showbiz for ugly people

The Religious Musings Page.

 

I am reliably informed that, in Wales,  a conversion to the Holy Mother Church of Rome is described as going up the candle. The Church, is of course,  keen on conversions, and I had the educative experience once of attending, with mr ishmael, a Catholic baptismal service conducted by a black missionary priest - on conversion mission from Africa to Birmingham, and finding his congregation sadly lacking in faith and decorum. Here's mr ishmael's description of the event:

 

No Retreat Baby, No Surrender -  (mr ishmael.1st May 2013)

I went to a Roman Catholic christening, oh, fifteen, sixteen years ago;  it was the grand-daughter of a friend, being christened, and her father - my friend's son  - had been an altar boy,  you'd think he'd know the form -  and my friend, the grandfather,  the nephew of countless nuns and priests - would know that this was a solemn occasion and if you're not going to do it solemnly, you shouldn't fucking do it at all.  But no, it was a lovely day and all the young women were half-naked and bare-headed, and the adults not much better. Mrs ishmael, alone, had a shawl around her head and shoulders - everybody was there to BeThere4 the young parents and the christenee and then go and get pissed.

There was a new priest, however, a mean-looking little black guy, just in from Africa, and he was having none of this BeThere4U shit.  He'd obviously cast his eye over the congregation and decided, as I had, that this was a bunch of GodlessHeathenBastards, that, effectively, they were wasting his fucking time.  He launched into one, fired a round of fucks into the putative Godparents and the parents.  Have you got the first idea of what it means  to be a Godparent, he thundered?  No, you don't, it's obvious, you need to choose people who will aid the child's path to God, who will, lifelong, stand-up for the child, guide her and support her in the ways of the Lord; these, he said, gesturing at the BeThere4Us, these are just people you met in a nightclub. You can't make Godparents of people you meet in a nightclub.  But, bless him, the wee black priest, he finished the service and everyone got into a hotel down the Hagley Road as quick as possible  and got blootered, in a very real BeingThere4U sense...

And so it came to pass, within only a handful of years, that  young mother and father put themselves asunder and nary a one of the BeThere4Users, did any BeingThere4Anybastard. The wee priest was right, we had all been, all of us, non-believers like me, partial-believers and washed in the blood of Christ, cast-iron believers; had all been mocking God, taking the piss.  Oh,  the wee girl still sees her Dad, who is on his second or third partner, whilst living with her mother, who is - tu-tut - on her sixth.

Enraged by Archbishop Beard and his GodlessHeathenBastard cronies proclaiming Britain a secular/multifaith/post-Christian society  I felt determined to prove him wrong and cast around for some Christian sect or other, in whose box I might be ticked, come census time; whose name I might tender when being admitted to hospital. The Quakers, I thought, were worth a look and I e-mailed  Friends House, requesting their information pack.  It was a big disappointment - their services, ostensibly the worship of Jesus Christ,  are a silenced version of happy-clappyness.

Although I despise organised religion, I value the idea of a people coming-together in worship, by arrangement or spontaneously and like even the most uneducated, the most defiantly agnostic, I am steeped in the art, architecture, literature, music and jurisprudence of Christianity, I could not  be otherwise, even were I Richard Dawkins, Bishop of the Holy Church of Show Business.

I try to go to church at Easter and Christmas, preferably in a big, fuck-off cathedral;  I try to listen to Choral Evensong on Radio Three and I go to the odd Christian drama, like the recent Mystery Plays in York Minster, and although I would hang, draw and quarter  most prelates and priests, I love the King James Bible as though it was the Granny I never had; the psalms, the proverbs, the lamentations and the gospels.  I am a cultural Christian, a Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist.

 

I never knew any grandparents. Obviously I had some, it's just that they were all dead before I was born. One grandfather was a Glasgow shoemaker,  the other a clarinettist for the BBC;  that's as much as I know and I think it's as much as I want to know, despite the entreaties of that chirpy, little blonde woman on the FindMyAncestors adverts - FindMyAncestors?  TraceMyPast?   something like that, something aimed at the self-obsessive in us all.

It simply doesn't matter to me whether or  not my ancestors fought at Waterloo or Agincourt and there's absolutely no way of knowing what  they did in the last Ice Age;  all I need to know is that my ancestors, like yours, got pissed-off with swimming around in the seas, crawled up the beach, up into the trees, down into the caves, out onto the planes, into the cities and with any luck out to the stars,  that's my genetic inheritance, my great aunt being a missionary in Africa is neither here nor there.

Back when he was an engaging young singer-satirist,  before he became an awful, grimacing, prowling, buffoon-like parody of himself, Loudon Wainwright used to sing I'm a son and I'm a father, I am just ay middle man.  It's a good line, for him, anyway.  That's all there is to it, for most of us, those of us not connected to thieving, murderous, venal royalty and aristocracy - or to GoodFamilies, as the nation's filth call themselves;  that's all there has been for most of humantime, one's parents might glimpse one's own children before dying themselves.

You read about loving couples who truly deeply want a family because they truly deeply believe that it is right for them and that she just knows that he would be a wonderful father and he knows that a family would be just howsorightisthat for her - don't they just make you fucking heave and puke these couples - and so they make love considerately, thoughtful of each others' needs, and, if they are family-hungry, in just the right position and at just the right time of her cycle and on and on and fucking on they go, about the perfection of their shitty little consumer lives, even their copulation benchmarked against some Which Report on ProCreation.  The rest of us just do fucking, as we have since we came out of the ocean and our children, rightly, in my judgement are Lust's remembrances of itself.

How could it or should it be otherwise?  These are urges at work, forces way beyond rationalisation, try as we might, we and the priests.  Y'know? In the beginning was the word and the word was LetsFuck.  Says so in the Bible.

Many thanks to mr mongoose for the Easter Crossword. For those who may not have entirely got there, or want to confirm their answers are correct - here's the Sol-u-shon.

 

Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - anthologies of the work of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish plumber - can be purchased  from Amazon or from Lulu. 

 

Lulu Link for Vent Stack:

https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

 Lulu Link for Honest, Not Invent

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Link for Paper Back : 

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