Liturgy for the Passing of Carla Lane

Hymn (The Theme from Bread)

Greeting:

Joey Boswell: Greetings!

All: And Greetings to you.

Archdruid: I am a middle-aged woman in search of adventure. My life is dull, and yet opportunities abound. I am not married to a dentist, and my one son is married with a child and does not block the driveway with a car so we have to do an amusing "getting off the drive" dance. When will a tall dark stranger appear mysteriously to bring glamour and excitement into my life?

R Lucien: I'm worried about me rabbits.

Archdruid: I wasn't really thinking about you, R Lucien,

R Carol: R Lucien isn't really a candidate. He's really only interested in his rabbits.

A tea light is lit for the soothing of R Lucien's concerns about his rabbits

Mrs Boswell: I'm confused. Am I Mrs Boswell from the Liver Birds or Mrs Boswell from Bread?

Freddy Boswell: I'm not sure. Have you met Lilo Lil?

Mrs Boswell: SHE IS A TART!!!

Freddy: Then you're Mrs Boswell from Bread.

The Offertory Chicken is passed around

The Offertory Chicken

Liturgical Liver-dance

Archdruid: You dancin'?

All: You askin'?

Archdruid: I'm askin'.

All: We think it's a bit unseemly in Church really. 

Sandra: Do you think I'll ever get married?

Archdruid: One thing we can say is that Carla Lane would never have killed Harambe the Gorilla.

Ken Livingstone: No. That was Hitler.

Dismissal

Grandad Boswell: Where's me Pudding!

The Church of Saint Edward the Previous Vicar

Welcome to the website of the church of Saint Edward the Previous Vicar.

The church of St Edward the Previous Vicar is dedicated to the blessed memory of St Edward. Who was the previous vicar, in case you were wondering.

St Edward was a paradigm of ecclesiastical virtue. The father of four beautiful, well-behaved children. His wife, St Mrs Edward, kept herself to herself, didn't have any airs or graces, and was content merely to lead the Sunday School, play the organ, bake cakes for the fetes, lead the Under 4s Tot's Group, the Mothers' Union and the Jam-making Circle.

St Edward the Previous Vicar was a man of enormous resources and talents. He was available to all members of the parish at all times. Including his day off - indeed, especially his day off. His sermons, although only four minutes long, were beautifully-researched pieces of theology, full of brilliant illustrations and amusing stories. He had a psychic ability to know exactly what church building maintenance was required - including an uncanny ability to leave the pews exactly where they are. He was dedicated to all the hymns written between 1871 and 1872 - allowing the organist to play nothing else.

When St Edward the Previous Vicar was the vicar, the Parish Share was always easily paid, even when nobody gave any money in the collection. And the church was full. Completely full. People used to queue up. And there were hundreds of kids in the Sunday School. Hundreds.

The history of the name of the Church of St Edward the Previous Vicar is interesting. Until 2011, it was known as the Church of St Brian the Previous Vicar. St Brian was a holy man. So holy was the man that, by comparison with St Brian, the vicar at the time was, to be honest, a bit of a disappointment.

History does not record the name of the vicar at the time that the church was dedicated to St Brian the Previous Vicar. But we can assume he probably wasn't very good.

Priests "Too Busy to Know Whether They're Too Busy"

The Pope has said that priests have to stop being so lazy, and be more available for their congregations.

"That's absolutely great," said Fr McGuire of the Craggy Island Parish, "I'll have to make myself more available.

"I do have masses at 6pm on Saturday. Then 7, 9 and 11 on Sunday. And visits to the sick and dying. And random people knocking on the door asking for money. And then there's the street pastoring. And the two masses each week day. And confessions. And, as there's so few vocations and so little support from elsewhere, I've taken over the church at Rugged Island as well. But I'm getting on OK and I hope, if things work out OK, that I might be able to have some lunch on Thursday."

For a comparison, we asked the Revd Geraldine Granger, of Dibley Parish, whether she thought that Church of England priests might have similar problems. But she told us that, since Dibley has been merged with the Ridgeway Benefice, the M40 Cutting Benefice and and the parish of St Jude's the Useless, she hasn't really had much time to consider whether she's a bit busy.

The Great Lesbian Fish Film Shock Horror

Much excitement over the claim that there are lesbians in "Finding Dory".

But not really that radical. After all, Nemo is a clownfish. And to quote Wikipedia:

"In a group of anemonefish, there is a strict dominance hierarchy. The largest and most aggressive female is found at the top. Only two anemonefish, a male and a female, in a group reproduce through external fertilization. Anemonefish are sequential hermaphrodites, meaning that they develop into males first, and when they mature, they become females. If the female anemonefish is removed from the group, such as by death, one of the largest and most dominant males will become a female. The remaining males will move up a rank in the hierarchy."

Nemo's "Dad" may well have been a male when he fathered Nemo. But if he was top clownfish, when his mate died, he went on to be a female.

So Nemo's Dad underwent a transition to female. Two lesbian humans? Finding Dory isn't really trying.

Micromanaging the Scottish People

Zoe Williams draws attention to further attempts by the Scottish establishment to control its underlings. Sorry, population. Specifically as a man who says he doesn't want to hector women, tells us that women with any kind of health problem, or suffering from domestic abuse, should not have children until they've pulled themselves together.

It's a common theme in Scottish politics, this desire to keep the populace well-regulated and under the thumb. So you have to live a "good life" to have a baby - like it's some kind of reward for working hard for RBS and being a good Scots Nat.

In other news, the Scots government lowered the drink-drive limit a couple of years ago, and introduced a smoking ban in pubs 10 years ago. Now it has discovered that Scotland is a "nation of home drinkers". Well, imagine a well-known expression involving the discovery by Mr Holmes of Baker Street that he has run out of natural garden fertiliser. If you are surprised that if people can't drive home after one pint of beer, and can't smoke in pubs, they might drink at home, you probably shouldn't be consulted for your views on public health policy, as you clearly have no concept of what consequences are.

So the poorer people of Scotland, sitting in their lonely homes, drinking in front of Britain's Got Talent with a fag in their hand, wait anxiously in case the Glasgow health police knock on their doors to tell them they'd better not think about having sex without contraception. I don't think the Scots should have been allowed to have a referendum on their independence. Their mistresses and masters clearly don't think think they could be trusted with that much responsibility.

A Centurion and a Baptism

When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, ‘I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.’ (Luke 7:9)

The young couple came to the church with their friends and extended family, to have their baby daughter baptised.

The family as a whole looked uncomfortable and a bit out of sorts. The mum was so proud, and yet a bit flustered and confused. The men were over-dressed - unused to ties, the grandfathers in suits that had fitted them well when they last wore them twenty-five years ago. A few of them didn't realise it was so hard parking outside the church, and arrived ten minutes late, having driven up and parked on the country lanes. The really keen ones - the baby's parents and the godparents - had parked in the special parking spots that "belonged" to some regular worshippers.

But as increasingly they outnumbered the regulars, they smiled and laughed and chatted as their friends and relatives came in, blinking in the unexpected darkness. They chatted through the "quiet time" before the service, through the early parts of the service. They giggled as the priest went past in his rather fetching - as they saw it - frock.

It wasn't just the car parking spaces they'd nicked. The early ones had sat in the wrong pews. The late ones, unaware of the church tradition, sat near the front. They stood up and sat down at the wrong time. Assuming this was what you did at church, some of them knelt for all the prayers.

Being a family with a lot of young adults, there were a lot of children. The smallest toddler toppled off a pew and smacked his head on the back of the one in front, screaming through the confession. The bigger ones were swiftly bored and, with nothing to do, started squabbling and fighting. When the Gospel procession went down the aisle, nobody turned to face it and the reading was directed at the back of many of their necks.

During the sermon, shocked by there being a joke, a few of them laughed embarrassingly and far too long.

When it came to the baptism, the parents and godparents stood awkwardly around and mumbled their professions and promises. The child was baptised to a storm of flashlights from endless phones - one of which had played  AC/DC's "Hell ain't a bad place to be" during the sermon, when a real latecomer had phoned up to ask where the church was.

During the second set of prayers, the children had descended to throwing hymn books at each other. Their parents had given up trying to control them. The men mostly tutted, wandering when opening time might come round.

Having no idea what a "Eucharist" meant, the baptism party assumed that the Peace was the dismissal. While the regular congregation went around shaking hands with each other, the strangers walked straight out of the door and headed for the pub. A few of them thought it wasn't very nice of the vicar not to say goodbye. But mostly they didn't worry. The job was done.

The congregation relaxed. They could enjoy the peace of the Sacrament while simultaneously filing away being able to complain that the baptism people had walked out halfway through the service. They would enjoy that, during coffee. Normally it was just the vicar they had to complain about.

The vicar relaxed as well. He wasn't going to have to deal with the people who didn't really understand what they were doing, but came up for communion anyway. He hated that. Hated confusion. They had rules to keep things ordered.

 They'd sat quietly with religious faces and holy attitudes when the baptism family come in. They'd smirked when their guests had got things wrong. They'd rolled their eyes when the kids had toppled off the outside of the font while watching the baptism. They'd not welcomed them, they'd not helped them when they were confused.They'd glared at the seats they normally sat in, while carefully not looking in the eyes of the temporary occupants.

They'd never understood about Jesus on the cross, arms held out to the whole world. Not understood about preaching the Gospel to all nations. Missed the point of the story of the centurion.

They'd never really understood God's love at all.

"I Gave up Christianity and Started Following Jesus"

I heard this phrase quoted this morning. And it sounds so good, doesn't it? Going from that boring, old, dead tradition to following the man who who God chose to be on earth.

So the person who first used this phrase probably thought they were doing this:

But hang on a mo. There's a description for the belief system that involves believing in Jesus. It's.... what's the word? Oh yes. Christianity. You can't "give up" on Christianity just by deciding you don't like the definition of the word. What you're really saying is you're giving up all that judgemental / doctrinal / stuffy / traditional stuff, to follow Jesus. Leaving all those judgemental / doctrinal / stuffy / traditional people behind. But that still makes you a Christian, sorry. It's what the word means. 

What I suspect the expression really means is this: 

Or, being more charitable perhaps:

The Beaker view on the Guardian: Suppose it's Gone Forever?

Is the end of the Guardian in sight? The most recent ABC data shows that its circulation is down 3.8% year on year. It is very nearly half of one percent of the adult population; far less than that of the Telegraph, Mail or any other non-smug newspaper..

The study also shows that the Guardian is extremely bad at either making converts or retaining cradle readers. It can no longer depend on its heartland of moderate leftist voters. The two big left-wing parties, the LibDems and Labour, lost vast numbers of votes late year. It is only the smallest and most self-consciously left-wing forms of Socialism (Corbynisn) that manage to retain believers, in part no doubt because they feel cut off from the society around them.

This decline in self-identification probably has very little to do with belief. Guardian readers have always been heretics, with only the vaguest notion of what progressive views are, and still less of an allegiance to them. The difference is now that they don't even bother reading articles by Giles Fraser, even if they still hold the same vague convictions about being nice to people or the idea that Waitrose is somehow right.

The entire Guardian readership at an Owen Jones
talk on "how to be a really rich socialist"

Over the last 50 years “Polly Toynbee” has come to stand for the opposite of logic and reason. This is partly an outcome of the sheer drivel she writes, and her overwhelming belief that she is right about everything. “The Guardian” now appears to young people as pretentious ageing hippies, whose main purpose is to pretend to be really right-on in their sexuality, in the service of aspiring to some kind of sixties hipness. Supporting the Labour party was always going to be a high-risk strategy for a newspaper that tries to appeal to middle-class people. But the Guardian was so much a part of the old liberal state that life in post-liberal England was never going to be easy.

It’s hard to see a route back for the Guardian. One of the most striking features of the ABC data is that the only people reading newspapers just want to read about the weather, health scares and Princess Di conspiracies. Meanwhile, most new Guardian readers are just people who wonder where the Independent went. “Market Share” turns out to be a game that newspapers play with each other, and not with the outside world. The Guardian, which used to be as straightforward a route into liberalism as the Telegraph was for conservatism, has become very much alien and utterly irrational. All it now has is the people who comment BTL on "Comment is Free", in between shouting at Question Time and eating quinoa. Time is running out.

Liturgy for the Introduction of the Psychoactive Substances Act

A tea light is lit.

All: Ah! Chamomile! So relaxing.

ARP Hodges: Put that light out, Napoleon! Don't you know there's a war against legal highs on?

A tea light is extinguished.

The Platonic Ideal of a Polar Bear

Reporting that a polar bear / grizzly cross has been discovered, the Telegraph tells us that global warming is bad news for the polar bear.

In fact, faced with so-far unproven evidence that one grizzly has mated with one polar bear, expert Dr Andrew Derocher says,

"I hate to say it, but from a genetic perspective, it’s quite likely grizzly bears will eat polar bears up, genetically."

I'm sorry?

Is there a way in which the polar bear community is looking at the grizzly community thinking, "if we're not careful we'll all be grizzlies"? No. It's humans that do that sometimes. But if a human expressed that fear, it would be called racism.

What happened is that a grizzly met a polar bear of an alternative gender, sweet bear-love ensued, and the union was blessed. That the fruit of that union was subsequently shot by a hunter who was a member of North America's First Nations is a dilemma that requires a doctorate in Progressive Attitudes to resolve.

If the good doctor is concerned about individual bears rather than bearkind as a whole, then he should worry that a bear has been shot.  If he is concerned for the future of polar bear genes, he should be grateful that this kind of mating is occurring. Because only by hitching a ride on grizzly bear genes will polar bear genes survive in the world that is apparently before us.

If the doctor is worried about polar bears as a concept - as a whole - then he needs to investigate his assumptions. Why is the concept of "polar bear" important? Is it a Platonic Ideal, to which all earthly polar bears are merely approximations? If so - is this a scientific concept? Doesn't strike me as one.

Strikes me the doctor's comment:

“I hate to say it, but from a genetic perspective, it’s quite likely grizzly bears will eat polar bears up, genetically"

is pretty much blaming an innocent. Did grizzlies cause this? What the doctor should be saying is,

“I hate to say it, but the world is warming and EVERYBODY IS GOING TO DROWN.”

You can blame that on human beings, if you think global warming is human-caused. If you think it's natural, you can blame it on God. Or, if an AGW-denying atheist, on solar cycles or Catholics or it's one of those things.

But you can't blame the grizzlies.  It was an Arctic evening. The Northern Lights were shining. And there - pale of complexion and black of nose - was a polar bear. They just did what came naturally. The grizzlies are innocent.

Eating Blue Lobsters - For Their Own Good

I am, I will admit, concerned about the discovery by fishers of bright blue lobsters. Blue lobsters, while quite rare, are by no means unheard of, and do not necessarily mean the end of the world.

No, what worries me is that the blue lobsters in the BBC story are being put back. You see, if we eat all the greeny-gray lobsters but put back the blue ones, we are giving blue lobsters an evolutionary advantage. In the end, all lobsters will be blue.

And then what? Cockles, clams and cod, noticing that bright blue seafood is safer, will start going bright blue as well. Eventually we will have nothing to eat.

And there's a reason why lobsters are dull-coloured in general. Probably, I would think, camouflage. If we encourage blue lobsters eventually all the lobsters will be bright blue, but eaten by bright blue predators.

Which leads me to this counterintuitive conclusion.Eat blue lobsters. It's good for them.