You'll Never Walk Alone

Can Liverpool-Supporting Beaker Folk please note that our "Litany of Woe for an Under-performance" will be held at 8am in the Moot House.

We won't bother printing off the orders of service.

You know them off by heart by now.

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Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

Glitter Bomb

Afraid we've had to seal off the Moot House. After yesterday's "Messy Feast of St Francis de Sales", we realised the Little Pebbles had managed to scatter so much glitter on the tables and floor that, when swept up, it hit critical mass.

Glitter hitting critical mass is in many ways completely dissimilar to uranium doing the same thing. 16 pounds of condensed multi-coloured glitter develops a fabulousness coefficient of anything up to 10¹⁵. And this permeates anything within a four mile radius with magical happenings.

Thankfully the Moot House has a spiritual sump set into the Mystic River, and therefore we're able to keep the surrealness to normal levels outside. We're monitoring the unicorns and once their eeriness drops we'll be able to resume normal service.

To An Unknown Idiot

We Beaker Folk have many saints, as may be seen in the increasingly-obsolete "Beaker Common Prayer". But among them, we were always worried that we might be forgetting somebody important and whose intercessions we might be in need of.

That's why the plaque on the North East but a bit to the North wall of the Moot House has always been dedicated "To an Unknown Idiot". We never knew when this idiot might come in handy. Human idiocy, after all, is the world's most powerful renewable energy source.

Over the years, the Beaker Folk have tied clouties to the Prayer Tree before the plaque in order to request all sorts of ridiculous boons from wherever they thought this immense power for stupidity might be. They have included:

• Donald Trump's modesty
• A unicorn that runs on unleaded fuel
• A lost chord which is secretly A_m⁶ on Friday nights
• An octarine beetle
• A perpetual motion machine
• A score of 19 at cribbage
• The ability to hang-glide under water
• The East Wind in a pint glass (held in with a beer mat)
• The sodium salt of helium
• The sunrise over the Atlantic in Cornwall

And finally today, they have realised who the Unknown Idiot is.

The man who promised us £350M by writing it on a bus. Who every time he opens his mouth, ruins a life. Who has now insisted that his colleagues provide £100M of  non-existent Brexit bonus for the Health Service. The many who couldn't put a garden over the Thames but thinks he can put a motorway over the English Channel. Some believe that Nigel Farage only exists so that Boris Johnson is not the most ridiculous, preposterous, unbelievable politician in the United Kingdom. All we can say is, Farage has his work cut out. Boris, you're not funny any more. You're not unstoppable any more. And nobody believed anything you said in the first place.

The one we called the Unknown Idiot, we now declare to you. And the bad news is, now he's just a Known Idiot. An Idiot Without Portfolio.

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(Image hacked out of this article - full image by Barcroft Media)

Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

Brexit is Magic

The penny dropped trying to discuss Brexit with a Brexiter today.

You see, I'd always thought that Brexit was a kind of religion. But it isn't, is it?

Brexit isn't about economics. Because nobody with any sense in that area would believe in Brexit. It's not about politics, really.

And it's not a religion. Firstly because, for instance, the evidence for the Resurrection is far greater than the evidence that Brexit is a great idea. But mostly because there's no idea of an ordering principle, and no moral element.

No, Brexit is magic. An attempt to change reality through the power of wishful thinking and the right words. The belief that if you write something you want on a bus, it becomes true.

Which is why you are wasting your time using economics, politics, geography or logic in reasoning with a Brexiter.  None of these things apply in a Brexit worlview. Because Brexit is magic. Magic doesn't need to obey normal rules. All you have to do is say the right things, in the right way, and everything will turn out great.

And the great thing about magic is that it has an all-purpose get out. When Brexit is a disaster, it's not going to be because of all the tin foil hat-wearers, Putin bots and pub racists saying "We're leaving." No. When Brexit is a disaster, it will be because the politicians didn't do it right. The idiocy of just walking out of a massive, successful long-term trading relationship will never be shown. Because, even if Theresa May isn't a brilliant politician, she's good enough to know that "just leave" is a stupid thing to do. So it will never be tried.  And therefore never disproved.

No, just keep saying to yourself "We're leaving." It's definitely going to work. And if it doesn't, it's because of all those evil Bremoaners who just don't believe enough. They're like the Darling family refusing to think wonderful things so they can fly. Just do what the magicians say, believe in Brexit, and before you know it you'll be in Neverland. And if Theresa May can't get us there - surely Jacob Rees Mogg can? That's the Brexit belief after all - that Mogg is just waiting, like King Arthur beneath the hill, to lead us all to glory.

If you can believe that Jacob Rees Mogg is the sort of person you cocked a snook at the "Establishment" to put in power, magic is your stuff. If you think that Boris Johnson is going to put a bridge over the Channel when he can't even put a garden over the Thames - when in fact all he is capable of is putting his leg over women he's not married to - you believe in magic. It ain't science, it ain't politic, it ain't economics.

Brexit is magic.

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Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

A Religion of Renewal

From an Archaeological Report, c 2900 AD

We still do not have a clear view of the religion of the 21st Century people of Great Britain. Their habit of recording things only on electronic devices means that all we have preserved are a series of documents in increasingly small formats, dedicated to a protective deity called "The Guardian", and a another set of documents that seemed to have identified the Solar God with naked women.

We know that the Britons had a routine on Sundays of paying homage to their large metallic altars. These they washed and polished, and occasionally stacked them out on the long ritual trackways between their major settlements. But their major ceremonial sites were visited maybe 3 or 4 times a year.

The major festival seems to have been a week after the Winter Solstice, when they carried offerings of evergreen trees to these sites and threw them into large metal ritual containers. We have no idea why they did this.

Their other ritual was to take all kinds of plastic and metal possessions and throw them into similar containers. As far as we can understand, their belief was that these possessions were an offering to an incredibly powerful deity that lived beyond the eastern sun rise, that took these offerings and renewed them. It is is an incredibly powerful illustration of a belief in the possibilities of death and rebirth - of decline and renewal.

But something, it seems, went wrong. The deity decided it did not want the offerings any more, and the worshippers had to keep their  oblations to themselves.  At the same time, they appear to have entered a time of decline through a cataclysmic event they called "the Brexit". As a result, they hoarded their offerings, often having to patch up clothes using a method called "sewing" which, during their easy times, they had neglected.

And so the British civilisation declined. The ritual sites were no longer used. And the story of the divinity China, which happily took the used belongings of the British and brought them shiny new possessions, sank slowly away beyond the eastern horizon.

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Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

Giles Fraser says, "Know Your Place"

Inspire by this tweet from Giles Fraser:

Matthew Parris right to have a pop at social mobility - a terrible idea in which improvement is all about the individual not the community.

— Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) January 20, 2018

As the old hymn has it

The rich man in his castle
The chavs on the estate
Giles Fraser is the parson
To keep them in that state.

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Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

Getting the Point of the Driving Laws

In the world of "rules for drivers", Jordan Cassidy of Manchester knows how it works.

Faced with getting enough points on his licence to lose the right to drive for a while, he appealed to the magistrate that if he were banned, he would lose his job, and his girlfriend might leave him.

He has a driving job. A man who can't drive anywhere without speeding - because, let's face it, anybody who actually gets caught speeding is pretty much speeding a lot all the time - asks not to be banned from driving because it would stop him driving for a living.

He has a job doing something he is apparently incapable of doing without breaking the law.

If a baker couldn't make bread without spitting in it, we would rightly demand that the bakery found a new baker. If a carpenter repeatedly hit her or his colleagues with mallets, that carpenter would have to do the carpenting somewhere else. If a Foreign Secretary repeatedly made decisions that were bad for this country, lied, and endangered the safety of some its nationals... no, wait. Let's not go with that one.

So it strikes me the very thing a magistrate should not allow Jordan Cassidy to do for a living, is the thing that he is begging to keep his licence to do. Chairman of the magistrates, George White, has explicitly said that he will bend the rules for poor driving to enable Cassidy to drive. Poorly. George got to be very stern. But Jordan Cassidy can still be behind the wheel tomorrow.

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Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

Cider Vinegar "Can Cure Death"

You know, ever since that mould grew in Number 1 Vat in the Beaker Cider Shed, we've been asking ourselves the all-important question: how can we make the most money out of this? And we've realised that the obvious answer is, people don't much like doctors and can be persuaded that everyday food products are actually medicine. So,  with a flu epidemic and colds ravaging the country and Storm Boris about to bring in giant winds, here's a quick run down of what cider vinegar can do for you.  Note that Beaker Cider Vinegar (£4.99 for 100ml at the Beaker Bazaar) is 100% organic. As if we'd kept everything clean properly with sulfite, we'd still have drinkable cider.

1. If you're already well, a glass of mixed cider vinegar and apple juice can make you feel all virtuous.
2. If you're feeling the cold, or "a bit nesh" as the physicians say, the juice of half a lemon and a thimble of cider vinegar is repulsive.
3. Add cider vinegar and salt to fish and chips to make them nearly as nice as using proper vinegar.
4. Using cider vinegar as a topical application for piles will make you wonder why you ever complained about the pain before.
5. If you dilute cider vinegar to homoeopathic proportions it is invaluable for hydration. Or washing the car. 
6. A teaspoon in half a glass of orange juice can remove all symptoms of the common cold within 3-4 weeks.
7. Used neat on stains on clothes you can give them a nice "apple vinegar" smell.
8. A broken leg can be treated by drinking a couple of glasses of cider vinegar, and then going to hospital.
9. A cup every day (UK size "Sports Direct" mug) will make you invulnerable to the ageing process.
10. Add a drop of elderflower cordial and it will save your eternal soul as well.

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Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

Blue Monday

Now the sun has set on another Blue Monday, a few thoughts.

First thought - Grolz, responsible for our PA, got rather confused. Piping "Happy Mondays" throughout the Community instead of "Blue Monday" just confused everyone.

The Blue Act of Worship had its own issues. First up, because it attracted a load of "worshippers" in black macs that we thought had died out in the 80s. Secondly because with blue vestments, blue voile
swathing the Worship Focus, the Husborne Brook died blue, and the roof of the Moot House painted blue to reflect the sky - we wish - everything was just too peaceful.  The idea of Blue Monday is a time of existential angst that all the good stuff is gone from our lives and we've got Eurovision and the Boat Race to stagger through before we get to the Summer. Not for people to rock off to sleep surrounded by happy colours. Next year we're changing to "melantonin blue", the colour they try to screen out in phones.

And now it's all over, what are we left with? As ever, a sense of emptiness and disappointment. Once again we've suffered from the way that Blue Monday - originally a Pagan festival, which was Christianised under St Disgustin', has become over-commercialised. When all you see for weeks in advance is Blue Monday adverts, and reruns of Summer Wine "Blue Monday" special episodes. When the satellite channels switch to be "Blue Monday Gold" and "Blue Monday Movies 2". When Jeremy Corbyn and his Smurfs have visited your house, to take away an unexpected amount of your earnings and leave you with some Islington Spa mineral water and a hollow sense of having done the trendy thing - when it's all over bar recycling the blue wrapping paper and shoving the last remaining Smurf into the Sin Shredder. Well, Blue Monday is over for another year. As John Lennon said, "And so this is Blue Monday - and What Have we done? Written a hypocritical song about no possessions and pranced around in the Buff". And I think we can all learn a lesson from that.

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Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

Stairway to Heaven

When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ (John 1) 

Strange little encounter. And in Nathanael's case, a strange identification. Based on some simple elimination, it's been deduced that Nathanael in John's Gospel is Bartholomew. Maybe, maybe not. I suppose it doesn't really matter. Except to Nathanael, and maybe Batholomew. As Eric Mascall apparently said:

Beneath a fig tree once
there sat a very pious Jew
And if you then had asked his name
He’d say “Bartholomew”
But then the higher critics came
with “L” and “M” and “Q”
And if you now would ask his name
He hasn’t got a clue.

Sitting under a fig tree sounds like a nice thing to do. On a drowsy day, down by the sea side. And Nathanael is, it seems, musing on the story of Jacob's Ladder. In that passage in Genesis, you'll remember that when Jacob with travel was weary one day.... he had a dream and saw the ladder that went up to heaven and the angels of God going up and down.  One of those very - for want of a better word - pagan bits of the Old Testament. Full of awe and numinousness. If that's a word.

I always wondered about that expression - is it a stairway to heaven? Or is it a ladder? Then I visited Thomas Hardy's birthplace. And saw the second staircase they put into the house, when they extended it for Hardy's parents' growing family. They put it in so the lads could go dowladders without traipsing through their parents' bedroom. And it's not quite a ladder - the steps are bigger - but then it's not quite a staircase - it's too steep. If you're going down it, you have to turn round as if you were climbing a ladder. I guess, when you're saving space and health and safety hasn't really been invented, it makes sense.

And so when Jesus sees Nathanael he makes a really strange identification.  He tells him that he is Jacob's Ladder. He is the one who will make the bridge between earth and heaven.

Nathanael seems shocked by Jesus knowing the obvious thing - that he was dreaming under the fig tree! Yet he's not surprised when Jesus tells him that Jesus is the ladder to heaven - because, for some reason, Nathanael has already made that jump - already recognised him as the Son of God.

What they will all discover, as the story unwinds, is the way in which Jesus is that ladder to heaven. The way he will join heaven and earth is by hanging on a cross. The ladder by which we can be carried up to heaven is by his body - hanging there.

And the ladder that God puts in place breaks forever the gap between earth and heaven. The route to heaven is clear - and yet the angels go down the ladder as well as up. So heaven is here - in believing hearts, in those moments when we know we are reaching beyond what we thought was ordinary, in bread and wine. We are not cut off from God - because God himself has made the route from heaven to earth, and earth to heaven. Maybe we need to take some time out - maybe not sit under a fig tree, in this weather - but heaven is here. Because Christ has brought it here.

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Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.

Can Nigel Farage Ever Find True Joy?

Fascinated by Marina Hyde's piece on Nigel Farage.  Obviously, and rightly, she focuses on the likelihood that his sudden declarations about a second referendum are down to people no longer caring about him; his removal from the spotlight.

But she also says the following, which I reckon is really interesting:

Few people are more nostalgic than Nigel Farage. He used to get misty-eyed about the early days of Ukip – “Bomber Command ties” … “you look back and think, God, how did we get away with that?!” – and now he gets misty-eyed about the referendum.
I can’t help feeling Nigel would like to somehow recover a single elusive instant from the past and dwell in its perfect stasis for ever. 

And immediately I'm thinking of CS Lewis, remembering the time when he was a child, looking at a tiny garden his brother made out of some sticks, plants and a biscuit tin lid, and suddenly knowing a longing for something beyond that garden. Lewis called that sense of something missing, and yet calling, "Joy". It's a longing beyond anything that can be satisfied in the earthly things of this world, beyond love, sex, music or great art. And yet all of those things can give you the sense of Joy and the thing that can't quite be reached.

Maybe that's where Nigel is. Sensing the thing that gold elevators, Fedora hats, Referendum results and having your wages cut can't deliver.  Maybe all this has been a desperate attempt to find the Love that is beyond all loves, the longed-for behind all longings, the pearl beyond price that gives us all worth. Is this why Brexiters are still so angry, despite winning, and can't get over it? Because the thing they thought they wanted isn't the thing they are really longing for?

Just a thought.  Pray for Nigel.

Want a good laugh? Want to laugh at the church? Want to be secretly suspicious that the author has been sitting in your church committee meetings taking notes? Then Writes of the Church: Gripes and grumbles of people in the pews is probably the book for you. From Amazon, Sarum Bookshop, The Bible Readers Fellowship and other good Christian bookshops. An excellent book for your churchgoing friends, relatives or vicar. By the creator of the Beaker Folk.