Liturgy of St Patrick's Day Appropriation

Archdruid: Top of the Morning to Ye!

All: To be sure, to be sure.

Hymn: Lord of the Dance (Flatley)

Archdruid: Ah; Irish dancing. Like an antidote to Charismatics.

Voice from the back: What about the Charismatic Catholics?

Archdruid: Sssh.

Hymn: My Lovely Horse

Archdruid: We've got to lose that sax solo.

All: Drink!  Drink!  Drink!

Archdruid: You lot been drinking already?
All: Ted - we mean, Eileen - we've been drinking like mad eejits.

Archdruid: Now a time of reflection as we consider all that has happened since last St Patrick's Day

Hymn: What's another Year? (Logan)

Child who asks Liturgical Questions, a bit like Passover Only Obviously We're Not Jewish: Why do we celebrate St Patrick's Day when we're nearly all English?

Archdruid: O "Child who asks Liturgical Questions, a bit like Passover Only Obviously We're Not Jewish" - the answer is clear. St George was a Turkish knight who killed a dragon in Egypt and is celebrated in England and also Georgia. As such he is multi cultural, a symbol of the great melting pot of acceptance and tolerance that is modern England.  And deeply boring on the same count. Whereas Patrick is Irish...

All: Actually, no. He's English. May even be from Towcester, would you believe.

Archdruid ...As i say, Patrick is Irish. And as such, a symbol of fun, craic, being at ease with oneself and yet simultaneously being aware  of deep spiritual truth. We English - devoid of spiritual heritage apart from singing psalms in a technique we don't understand in cold buildings - we look into the well of our spiritual emptiness, and throw everybody else's spirituality in to make ourselves feel spiritually authentic.

All: Ouch. Do you mind if we play some bodhrans to cheer ourselves up after that piece of painful truth?

Archdruid: To be sure. And don't forget to pick up a blow-up Leprechaun from the Beaker Bazaar. Double price while St Patrick's Day lasts.

Blessing

May the sun beat down on your head, unless you're thin on top in which case wear a hat.
May the snails not crunch under your feet on foggy days.
May catering lorries give you a wide enough space to cycle safely.
May the black stuff be black
And your whiskey spelt with an "e".
May the craic flow
And gentle winds blow
And the gentle rain not seep in through your eaves, causing a persistent and annoying damp problem
Until we meet again.

Being Grant Shapps

I'm really shocked. I always thought that Michael Green was one of our better-behaved Beaker Folk. Quietly working away as a web marketing guru, not one of us guessed he was an MP and Tory Party chair.

Anyway, now his cover is blown he has had to leave our little Community. Which is bad enough. But now it turns out we've also lost a number of other residents - Lord Lucan, Princess Diana and Vladimir Putin. And the guy down the chip shop who swore he was Elvis Not to mention the Community's beloved retired horse, Shergar.

You don't think.....? We never saw them in the Moot House together.

Stonehenge on Stilts

Ah me. Another day, another radical theory about the use of Stonehenge.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/15/circular-thinking-stonehenges-origin-is-subject-to-new-theory

The trouble with most radical theories of Stonehenge, like this one, is the assumption that the ultimate configuration of the monument - with a complete sarsen circle, but before half of it disappeared - is what the original builders had in mind. As if the Saxon builders of a church said to each other, "in 1200 years time, just our tower will be left - but it'll be the perfect counterpoint to the 1984 loos and the pink chairs the vicar will replace the Victorian pews with." No. Stonehenge was a living building - knocked around, no doubt with people declaring it didn't have bluestones when they were a child, for a hundred generations.

The other trouble with most radical theories of Stonehenge, like this one, is that there's no evidence. That the Pope used to be carried around is not a proof. Sky platforms on which sky worshippers could conduct ceremonies would require infrastructure to support them that simply hasn't left any evidence of existence.

Maybe the whole theory is wrong. Maybe they used the flat tops of the trilithons to expose the dead, collecting up the bones as they fell. We can all play this game. 

The latest serious theories see Stonehenge, connected by the Avenue and the Avon to the wooden Durrington Walls, as the place of the dead. Durrington, with its midwinter hog roasts, was the place of the living. So looking up could be totally the wrong direction - the south-western horizon is where to look. The place where, bringing warmth and light to the dead - clustered in barrows around the landscape - the sun comes itself to die.

Greyfriars Blues

On the demise of the old Northampton Bus Station

Stop the temporary clock, ring a brutalist knell,
Pause and salute the closing of the Mouth of Hell
Silence the traffic and with some efficient cops
Evacuate the town centre, till the nightmare pops.

Let aeroplanes circle over Sywell
Scribbling on the sky - "you'll have to drive to Twywell",
Put crepe bows round the necks of Bridge Street drunks
Worry that the noise might wake the long-dead monks.

You could get to North, or South, or East or West,
Commute to work in the morning, or home to evening rest,
Our day-trips, our journeys home, on drunken nights our grief;
We thought Greyfriars would last for ever: Imagine our relief.

The buses are not wanted here: let them to Northgate roam;
Let them block the Mounts; take hours to get you home
Let Health Service workers fret in three-hour queues.
Or head to the Olde England, and turn to the booze.

Bus Hits Bridge - Bridge Not to Blame

Excitement in West London today as a double-decker bus hit a bridge.

Newspapers reported that the bridge "came out of nowhere", was not wearing hi viz and had not been wearing a helmet.

Forecast a Daily Express Headline

"Will Solar Eclipse Cause Widespread Power Cuts,Tidal Waves and a Killer Heatwave?"

No.

Mothering Sunday

I always look forward to Mothering Sunday. It is not the English equivalent of the American "Mothers' Day", let's be clear. Oh no. In fact it has nothing to do with human mothers at all. It does in fact go back to the days under Henry VIII or some other evil autocrat, when for reasons that are unclear everybody had to live in the village next door. Then on Mothering Sunday you got the Sunday off to go back to see your Mother Church - ie the one in the village that you grew up in. And you'd hope to see your family.

Of course, this would only work for sister and brothers. You wouldn't see your parents, as they would have gone back to the village they grew up in, to find that their own parents, if they were still alive, had gone back to the villages where they grew up. So every year people would pointlessly scurry around the countryside, not seeing the people they were hoping to see, in a fever of unproductive relocation on which the Methodist Church later based its ministerial deployment strategy.

Naturally, when Cromwell took over, the whole thing was banned as a Popish superstition - that is, a superstition that was actually invented by the poet Alexander Pope - and everybody had to stay where they were, every Sunday, until the Industrial Revolution.

It was the Oxford Movement that reintroduced Mothering Sunday to England. Newman, on holiday in Morwenstow, was excited to discover that local vicar Mr Hawker had, under the influence of cocaine, invented the Harvest Festival. Newman wanted to invent a festival of his own - one that would enable him to wear the new Rose-coloured vestments that his own doting but increasingly colour-blind mother had knitted him. Hawker said to him, why not celebrate his mother's rather odd gift on the fourth Sunday in Lent - the date on which the parcel had arrived - by reintroducing Mothering Sunday? Newman went back to Oxford a changed man.

The re-invention of Mothering Sunday by Newman had the medium term effect of causing him to leave the Church of England, as the colour of the vestments was regarded as deeply suspicious in a country that had only recently made Oscar Wilde illegal. But after he left, it was realised by the liberal wing of the Anglican Church that in fact Newman's new tradition was a godsend. It enabled the sort of people who worried that others might take offence at things to worry that people might take offence. And those sorts of people love that. Specifically the people they were worried about offending included: 

• People whose mothers had died
• People who were adopted
• People who were grown to full term in a test tube
• People who never really liked their mothers
• Men who said "how come there's not a Fathering Sunday?
• People who couldn't be mothers
• People who wouldn't be mothers
• People who had any other mother-related issues
• People who were offended that all the people above were offended
• People who just like being offended.
• People who were still stuck in the village next door under Cromwell's laws

And so began the tradition of explaining that Mothering Sunday is about the Church as mother. About God as our mother, in the more progressive congregations.
And about Jesus having had a mother, but not mentioning her too much, in churches of the more evangelical tradition. Yes, he had a mother, but there was nothing special about her. Except  for her being Jesus's mother. And being there at his birth - obviously - death and - presumably - immediately after the Resurrection. And being called "blessed" by an angel and all generations. Let's move along shall we? Nothing to see here.  After all, Jesus said that we're all his mother. But not in a sense that men are really women. Oh no. Tell you what, let's junk the rest of the sermon. It's getting a bit involved. Floribunda, please can you, Posy and the other children hand out the potted primroses? NOT TO FRANK! He's a man.

And so, as we approach this Mothering Sunday, we remember all the people that could be, are or aren't mothers. And we remember that, when all is said and done, it's important that we deliberately don't inadvertently offend anyone.

Keith had better have bought me a card and a bottle of gin, that's all I'm saying. Decent gin. Not that own-label rubbish I got last year.

Rowan Atkinson's Funniness Index

Ah, the wonder that is this most holy of Comic Relief nights. The night every year when we express our hope that aging comics can resurrect their careers. When we remember when Griff Rhys Jones was hip and not whinging about property taxes in Central London.

But Comic Relief is also a biennial event when we remember how old we are getting. We express our age in terms of how funny the most recent appearance of Rowan Atkinson is - with the sketch where he walkeed into a tree as the baseline..

It's not looking good.

We must be getting very old.

Or that joke isn't funny any more.

Jeremies - A Guide

Terry Pratchett RIP

Beaker Folk assemble disconsolately in Octarine hi-viz, bearing the legend "We stole a lot of  our stuff from you." 

Archdruid: Mort, you little sod.

All: Amen.

A luggage wanders miserably counter-sunwise round the Moot House on its hundreds of dear little legs, followed by three witches. The librarian of Unseen University swings dolefully from the bookcase. Far off, the setting sun makes the edge of the Diskworld nearest it quite warm, before dropping to bestow its rays on an ancient star-turtle. Great A'Tuin continues the endless journey, knowing that somehow there's not as much joy in the world as there was.

Jeremy Clarkson - A Lament

(Warning - mild bad language)

Woe is our week
And empty the weekend before us
For there is no Top Gear
Just a period of programming that is void and without form.

O how we rejoiced when we watched the Star in a a Reasonably Priced Car.
Though the star was normally someone we'd never heard of.
Or Ed Sheeran.
Which is much the same.

But now our enjoyment is spoilt by a fracas
And we don't know whether to rhyme that with "car" or "arse".
Since the programme normally features both
Normally one sitting on the seat of the other.
So either would work, in context.

But we shall not weep and lament
And not remain downhearted.
Instead we shall sign the petition
And demand the BBC bring back Clarkson

After all, though we don't know precisely what Jeremy Clarkson has done*
It can't be as bad as what Jihadi John has done. **
And he's still getting on the telly.

* allegedly
** probably