Cutting Out The Middleman – You Know It Makes Sense

Last Sunday (17/11/13) I was unfortunate to wake up early enough to listen to BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Worship. That particular day it was from Headington Parish Church. Still, I thought that a bit of hymn singing never did anyone any harm so I continued to listen. What I had forgotten about was that there was a sermon to be got through and as last week was the 50^th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis, he was chosen as the subject under, erm, discussion?

The bacon butty. Always a small slice of heaven - and almost my premature passport to the Pearly  Gates. Image courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

But, heigh ho, I persevered, after all they do say that suffering is good for the soul – even though I had already sold mine a couple of years previously. However, what I heard almost made me choke on my crispy bacon butty.

Before going any further, let me quote the BBC website’s (badly punctuated[1]) disclaimer concerning the content of the Revd. Prof. Alister McGrath's sermon: "This script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors ...changes may also be made at the last minute...".

Disclaimer nothwithstanding, this is indeed what the Reverend quoth from The Last Battle by CS Lewis:  [On seeing the new Narnia the Unicorn declared:] “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here”’. Then the lips of the Revd. Prof. dropped this pearl of wisdom (my bold): "For Lewis heaven is the "other country"  for which we were created in the first place.". Rather woolly thinking in my humble opinion.

OK, I know that greater, more capable commentators than I have written, spoken, chewed over and even been burnt at the stake for questioning the existence of god and his(?) designs for milennia. I know that the debate on free will has rumbled, and will continue to rumble, on for centuries, but I have to express my indignation at the above quotation. I find it so infantile, so silly, so... totally bollocks.

Quite simply, if we were all created for heaven in the first place, then why do we have to pass through this vale of tears? Come on, Rev., please! What kind of god dumps us here first? Why doesn't he just let us straight in instead of having us chance our spiritual arm? I'm sure that even the greatest monsters of the 20th century who caused so much anguish and suffering such as Mao, Hitler, Stalin and a whole host of smug TV presenters were once innocent children who helped little old ladies across the road.

Indeed, the Judaeo-Christian god himself is a cruel, vainglorious spiteful monster. He smites sinners[2]  razes whole cities and drowns innocent people and animals (which, of course, are amoral and do not have eternal souls that can be damned) because of the sins of a select few. Perhaps he more than most should not even be allowed to fill in the visa forms for the "other country".

The divine Ford Mustang Shelby. It would seem  that the celestial waiting list is even longer than  the now-defunct British Leyland’s was for its  magnificent Morris Marina. Image courtesy of amcarguide.com

Even his son wasn’t averse to saying the occasional porky to raise his audience ratings (my bold): "And I say unto you, ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." (Luke 11:9-10) I've been askething for a Ford Mustang Shelby for decades and I still haven't receivethed.

What's more, I've been looking for a set of lost house keys for the last 3 months - to no avail. 
Luckily I have a spare set, so I don't have to knocketh. These days JC would be hauled up under the Trades Descriptions Act (and figuratively crucified on Radio 4's You and Yours?).

 So please god, if indeed you do exist, then cut out the middleman and let us all in now so we don't have to suffer illness, mortgages, German motorbikes that don't work, bad TV series, Coca Cola at room temperature, unwashed hippies, people with halitosis and yet others that fart in lifts. After all, according to the Revd. Prof. Alister Mcgrath's reading of CS Lewis, we were all created for heaven anyway.

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[1] There shouldn't be a comma before the and.

[2] For example he fulminated Onan for coitus interruptus, for spilling his seed instead of impregnating the widow of his dead brother whom his father had forced him to marry – hence the term Onanism. 

Why Britain Should Be Thankful to Spain

… and not for the cheap good-quality wines, the olive oil (cheaper than oil labelled Italian, probably produced in Spain and bottled in Italy), or the holidays, be they of the cultural or beach variety. And definitely not for the histrionic, over-rated pretentious pap peddled by film director Pedro Almodóvar and considered "Art" by many misguided souls.

No, Britain should be grateful to Spain for the amount of highly-qualified, highly-cultured engineers, doctors, nurses etc. who want to make a decent life for themselves in the UK.

My colleagues and I have just finished a long and gruelling round of language certification exams for the students of our august university, a university whose internal schizophrenia is reflected in the student body and the population of Seville itself. I am, of course speaking in general terms, but it would seem to me that the students could be classified into two main groups, the backward-looking parochial types and the ambitious, motivated ones with an international outlook. 

The Humanities seem to fall quite neatly into the antiquated, parochial pigeonhole[1] while the Sciences are definitely more forward-looking, more academically up-to-date and definitely more innovative. In fact, the Faculty of Medicine here is a true centre of excellence, something also true of Life Sciences and Engineering.

Anyhow, back to the main argument. In my last round of oral exams, I was truly gratified by the scintillating performance by over 80% of the candidates, young people with great ambition, high expectations and limitless drive. Not only was I impressed by their use of English, but by their intellect and depth of thought. These are just the sort of people a country needs to progress economically and socially. Unfortunately for Spain, most of them want to contribute to the progress of other countries, mainly Britain, the US and Germany.

Spain isn't working.  

And it's not the fault of the Spaniard in the street 

(sometimes literally).

 Image: elcorreo.com

Perhaps “want” is too strong a word, perhaps not. Would these bright people stay in Spain if Society as a whole offered its young people more opportunities? Perhaps most would, I cannot say. But I can speak from personal experience. My own son is an economic migrant, although within Spain. In Andalusia he had little chance of getting a stable job – or indeed training – in his own field of interest and specialisation: high-performance motorbike mechanics. In reality, he had little chance of finding any type of job at all. Now, after three years of training and practice, he and a colleague from his course have just opened their own workshop in Barcelona (Global Motos, Josep Tarradellas 55, Barcelona. Tel. +34 931 413 084).

By dint of hard work and application.

By dint of hard work and application they have found a financial backer and have also received support from an official motorbike dealership in the form of workshop equipment and advice. In Andalusia, such a thing would be well-nigh impossible – unless you had connections in high places, in which case some sort of subsidy might well be forthcoming.

As in Andalusia, as in Spain in general (Catalonia excepted). Spanish Universities are producing whole battalions of highly-educated young people and then consigning them to a life of dependency upon their parents. If they are “fortunate” they will sweat out their youth in a series of short-term Macjobs with no real future of betterment. If not, then the only alternative left to them is to master the finer points of the latest X-Box or Play Station.

This is why British Society should be grateful to Spain. Thanks to such gifted young people, the British economy will have a brighter future while Spain, after two decades of economic effervescence, will once again fall into the sclerotic economic torpor to which its usually inept and far too often venal, rulers (now with the connivance of the EU) have condemned it for much of the last five centuries[2].

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[1] Could you believe that the Journalistic component of its Master’s in Translation concentrated exclusively on the translation of reports of 1950s football matches and abstruse fashion articles into Spanish??? Well, believe it. Really contemporary, mainstream stuff.

[2] As an economic migrant myself, I benefited from an excellent British state education and migrated to Spain in the late 1980s. I have never paid income tax in the UK, but now find that my Spanish income tax is contributing to the education of such brilliant young people who will in turn go to Britain and pay their taxes there. The ironies of life!

REFLECTIONS ON, AND FROM, A BALDING PATE

Or: Turn on Your Shears Relax and Float Downstream.

Yesterday I was using the electric clippers – number one – on my Amazonian rainforest of hair (i.e. the total area covered is decreasing alarmingly, especially on the uplands). As I was doing great execution on the remaining vegetation I entered into a Proustian state of remembering. Here is the result of my musings:

First came to mind the comment of Victor, coiffeur of choice to Liverpool’s punk and new-wave, of cutting it “down to the wood”. Victor. A fifty-plus old-fashioned barber. He had his one-chair business in what I imagine had been in former times the porter’s lodge on the black and white marble-tiled mezzanine floor of a beautiful, 19^th-century run-down office building in Whitechapel, less than 100 yards away from the NEMS music shop. If you were really lucky, he would show you the spaces between his fingers, encrusted with the hairs of the faces he had shorn and give them a squeeze, resulting in a satisfying ooze of interdigital pus.

In my memory (albeit rather sketchy due to the fact that I spent great part of the late 70s and early 80s in a confused state of chemical enhancement) the shelves jostled with the accoutrements of his trade and while you sat in your creaky, boil-inducing, leather trousers on an old bus seat waiting for the chop, you might find yourself sitting next to Robbo the massive, muscled skinhead – a gentle giant reputed to be an eight-times-a-night man or a suited gent, sporting a Masonic tie clip, from one of the offices above (what did they do there?). Victor’s was a place where people of all classes and conditions met and interacted.

Image courtesy of
http://tonsorialist.wordpress.com/category/haircuts/

At that time, my cut of choice was a flat-top[1] now, unfortunately, impossible. If I let my hair grow to a length of 1in.-plus, it forms a rather hestitantly ridiculous Robbie Williams crest. I am contemned to suede-headedness for the rest of my life, unless I decided to go in for a comb-over. Hell will freeze over first. Less, in this case, can indeed be more.

As the clippers continued to graze over my dome, my mind wandered further back. To the days of Les’s the Barbers. Les was a consummate hacker when there were only three computers in the whole of GB. All the boys in my primary and middle school went there for our monthly short back and sides, our hair hacked at and chewed up by Les and his blunt scissors. His scissors may have been blunt, but his hatred of kids was extremely keen; he brought a whole new meaning to the term slaphead. If we moved our heads, we would be cuffed around the ears and invited to “fucking keep still, yer little git”. And this in front of our dads! Dads, of course, were treated with great deference and their haircuts usually ended with a murmured ”Something for the weekend, sir?” at which point certain “surgical supplies” or “prophylactics” would be slipped into the dad’s top pocket. Such discretion! Now the properties of the London Rubber Company’s finest products[2] are trumpeted proudly on TV.

Granddads, in their turn, would obtain something even more mystifying and well worth watching: they would have the tips of their hair singed (even their ear hair!) once the ordeal of hacking and mangling was over. Now what was that all about? I suppose that, returning to the Amazonian metaphor, we could call it a minor case of slash and burn. I later learnt that htis was one of those old beleifs that hair was hollow and when cut, exposed the inner part to invasion form all sorts of nasties. Hair is not hollow; only some of the heads that sport it - footballers, for example

But back to the man himself. We were given our haircut money, plus a sixpenny tip, when sent

Similar to Thornton's - not quite the same but you get the idea. 

Image from the Web - sorry but I've forgotten the site. 

to get our hair cut. Obviously the wilier victim would hold back the tip and buy choccy next door at Old Mr. Thornton’s[3] (no relation). But such petty crime had its desserts. Miffed at not having received his Manegeld, your next haircut would be even more vicious. Oh, what a lark! Les was such a card, the Bastard!

He was also an enigma. Everyone knew at least something about everyone else in the neighbourhood[4], except about Les. He seemed to have no existence outside his den of torture. No-one, for example, ever saw him enter or leave the premises. No-one knew why he had one leg a good couple of inches shorter than the other. Motorbike accident? War wound? Birth defect? Why didn’t he get an orthopaedic boot? No-one knew. Everybody knew, however, who had had their hair cut at Les’. The layers in the hackee’s hair would be stepped corresponding to when he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

Of further, sociological, interest is the parade of shops itself. This formed the frontier between our neighbourhood of shabby genteel Victorian mansions and villas and the terraced housing, home to the rough boys who also went to my school – and Les’ Barbershop. I think all the kids on both sides enjoyed their first illicit encounters with alcohol (Bulmer’s cider) and ciggies (Woodbines) thanks to the rather liberal interpretation given to the law by Mr. Mackie, the owner and manager of the off-licence to be found at the end of the parade.

At the age of about thirteen I graduated to a Unisex salon, all chrome, black leather and smoky mirrors where, before it was cut, you would have your hair washed by rather attractive young damsels whose smocks always had the top two buttons undone. That is all I remember about that place – that and the large poster (changed monthly) of a naked lady stuck thoughtfully on the ceiling for the washee’s contemplation. Of little interest indeed compared with sadistic Les and, later, garrulous Victor whose décor and services (and in the case of Les, skills too) were basic, but whose ambience lingers still in the minds of all who went there for a haircut.

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[1]  A rather tenuously-related anecdote. In the Beatles’ “Come Together” Lennon begins with the lines: Here come old flat top/He come grooving up slowly. He later revealed in an interview that they were from a Chuck Berry song. Berry promptly sued for part of the royalties. And won (obviously).

[2] Including the famous Easy-on. Yet, if they are easy to put on, wouldn’t it be correspondingly easy for them to slip off during the act? I myself was conceived in such a manner when the easy-ons didn’t exist (in the days of, ahem, hard-on, easy off?) but the easy-offs most certainly did.

[3] Thornton’s general shop sold everything from ciggies, home-made ice cream and bags of broken biscuits to paraffin from a large tank at the end of the row of biscuit hoppers. Imagine a shop like the Local Shop in The League of Gentlemen. Old Mr. Thornton looked like an (even more) irascible Arthur Lowe with a Hitler moustache. When he died the “young” Mr. Thornton (60+ years old) took over until he succumbed to Parkinson’s.  

[4] Like Old Joey from the pub, who somehow already knew in the mid-60s that micro-electronic devices could be inserted into dental work and dentures so that “they” could keep tabs on us. His first order at the bar was a pint of bitter and a half of mild in a pint glass, this latter being where he would drop his dentures until chucking out time when he would retrieve his gnashers and drain the rather unappetising gargle. Or vice versa. In all fairness, he did work on the Polaris nuclear subs at Cammel Laird’s shipbuilders and perhaps knew, and talked about, stuff he shouldn’t.