Thursday, April 26, 2007

Shut your trap, you deluded imbecile

A gentleman told me the other day that, unless I believed in Jesus, I was going to go to Hell. I tried to make the point that a lack of belief in Jesus would necessarily imply a belief that Hell does not exist, but such finer metaphysical points were beyond him. I then tried to sympathise with his viewpoint. I had just come off an eleven hour flight from London in the tender care of United Airways, and felt well qualified to comment on life in Hell. He insisted that Hell was much even worse, that Hell was a walk in the park compared to United Airways, that it was a place of pain, and misery, and the wails of those tortured souls who know that it is too late to reverse the decisions that have led them to eternal damnation. 'Have you ever been to Heathrow?', I asked, 'Pretty much the same thing'. That shut him up.

What is it about lunatics that they always seem to catch me when I am at my lowest resistance? Many years ago, when I was moping around France in an adolescent fashion after some doomed romance or another, a Lutheran Minister from Korea decided it was the perfect moment to collar me and canvas my views on 'ungodly' modern pop music. Did I know, for example, that scientific experiments had shown crops to flourish when played Beethoven, but to whither and die when played heavy metal music? He then went on to assert Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water was all about oral sex.

That's the trouble with lunatics. It isn't enough for them to live in their own delusions, they need to share their demented ravings with me.

Friday, April 20, 2007

England, a nation of clotheshorses

It's been a while since my last entry. The culture shock of nestling back into the Warm Bosom of my Motherland seems to have let my muse reeling somewhat. You'd think that being English I would, in fact, feel comfortable in England, but I find myself having to relearn the basic survival skills.

Take clotheshorses, for example. In the USA where power is artificially cheap, everyone uses a tumble drier on laundry day. The average British urban dweller is too cheap to run one of these, so is forced to dry the week's laundry on a clotheshorse. For my American readers, a clotheshorse is a folding plastic or wooden rack on which damp laundry can be placed to dry out. It sounds simple, but there is a genuine artisanship in arranging the clothes in a fashion that creates space for more than a single shirt, three socks and a pair of underpants. Any overflow must be draped over chairs, and given that there's no real airflow hence it takes about three days to dry anything, it's important to maximize the clotheshorse loading. Most British alcoholics only develop their addiction because for most of the week, the pub is the only place that they can sit down of an evening. That and the fact that if they stayed at home they would be expected to talk to the wife.

Those living in the country and having gardens can use a washing line when the weather is sufficiently clement, but the only people who choose to live in the country with a garden are either ignorant peasants or have families, so obviously I don't mix with them.

Many of my friends have had babies. Normally I would disapprove, but I have suddenly realised that almost all of them have had girls, which implies that about the time that I make professor there will be a glut of female undergraduates.