Epitaph for Nigel the Lonely Gannet

Farewell to Nigel, lonely gannet
the saddest bird upon our planet.
Though odd, and though it sounds absurd
he fell in love with a concrete bird.

He brought her sticks and minnow meat,
dreamed of the patter of concrete feet.
He built a nest, and spoke of love,
wondered why they never soared above

and saw the wonders of the earth
or brought some Readymix eggs to birth.
Instead, till Nigel grew quite old,
she always seemed a little cold.

Now Nigel's served his lonely purpose
and gone to join George, the lonesome tortoise.
To roam the heavenly islands free
with concrete gannet angels by an opal sea.

Men, learn from Nigel's lonely life
His failed attempts to win a wife.
If a woman won't answer to your call
she'd rather you weren't there at all.




Melissa Sparrow (Mrs)

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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.

Super Blue Blood Lunar Eclipsopocalypse

The Moon Gibbon Folk are getting very excited about the Big Blue Supermoon Lunar Eclipse.

You know, in many ways, a Superblood Blue Moon Eclipse is a bit like Brexit. Nobody really understands it, and we won't be any better off after it. But that doesn't stop people mythologising it. Brexit has Jacob Rees Mogg. And we have a bunch of halfwits who think the Moon is going to be running with the blue blood of 1,000 Clangers, as they engage in a cosmic battle with a giant gibbon that is going to eat the moon.

Actually, though, the Moon Gibbon people have one thing going for them. At least they ain't Jacob Rees Mogg.

Now the Express can't let a good astronomical event go by without suggesting it is linked in some way to disasters or the end of the world.  With it being the first Blue Blood Super-Moon Eclipse Lunarpocalypse in over 100 years, they'd normally be declaring a state of Revelation at least, with Our Lady appearing in the heavens with a suspiciously EU-ish number of stars and the Dragon fighting the Gibbon while the Clangers are just so much collateral damage. And yes, we'll come to that.

Today they've also gone scientific, with the very calm, "May Cause Earthquakes." The headline tells us that there have already been two earthquakes today.  Which is scary really as Southern California alone normally runs at about 6 a day.

It's too damn quiet, Carruthers.

But to encourage us to quake with fear, the Express has the "self-styled Dutch earthquake predictor", Frank Makesitup, to tell us:

“whenever the three objects in our solar system lined up there was a significant earthquake anytime from the day before to one or two days afterwards”.

Let's say a significant earthquake is magnitude 6 or over. There are about 150 earthquakes of this magnitude a year. One just over every two days. So Frankie Boy is dead right. Whenever "the three objects" in our solar system line up (I guess there are only three) there is a significant earthquake over a four day period. And when those three bodies aren't lined up, the same. And those three  bodies line up twice a month, more or less, at new and full moon. The eclipses just need things to be slightly more accurate.

The thing is, the moon's gravity can affect the earth. After all, it makes the tides happen every day. Maybe there are more earthquakes when there's a big pull. I'll have to do the research. But when the Express tells us that there was a supermoon 8 days after a major earthquake - that weren't the supermoon. Not unless it were a time-travelling supermoon, able to operate at right angles, while not specially close to the earth.

Meanwhile in the world of self-styled prophets, the man who gave us the Killer Planet Nibiru - so we know we're on firm ground here - tells us that it will be the end of the world because today's big event coincides with an EU debate on Israel and Palestine.

Apparently the super blue blood moon lunar eclopalypse is God's judgement on a settlement in the Middle East. Which is odd. Let's break it down.

A blue moon is just a statistical occurence. The lunar cycle fits within a 31 day month, giving two full moons in a month occasionally. This is no more freaky than having 5 Sundays in a month, or 14 Sundays in a quarter. In fact, given that 5th Sundays are frequently the ones when rural benefices hold all-together services for multiple parishes in old village, they're actually a cause of far more supernatural fear than a mere blue moon. And more damage than the average lunar eclipse.

Lunar eclipses and supermoons happen on a regular, scientific basis. That's why we can predict them in advance. If they were signs of God's judgement, we'd know that the EU shouldn't be holding conventions on such days. Yet mysteriously they do. Or, to put it another way - before the Big Bang, when God was plotting the courses of the planets and stars, we are asked to believe, the date of an EU conference was important enough to affect the path of the moon. If God had gone to all that trouble, one might think, it would be simpler to just give Abraham a different stretch of land in the first place.

I recommend you read the Express piece on David Meade's warnings carefully. Not because it will tell you about the end of days. But for a laugh at its sheer scientific illiteracy, and poor writing. It tells us that the blue moon is actually white, then that it will be red. It also tells us we've not had a blue moon in over 150 years, when they occur every two or three.

And you know, no atheist can seriously claim religion is dead in this country while the Express exists. Its devotion to Diana and Maddie is akin to saints' cults. Its succession of forecasts of extreme weather and the world's end - never fulfilled -  show incredible dedication on the part of its readers.

The Daily Express is the Book of Jeremiah of our times. It's just that where Jeremiah was rejected because his message was so gloomy, the Express continues because it offers an endless succession of cosy apocalypses - promising the end of the world, but never delivering one.

So ignore the Express and the Gibbon Moon Folk. Get out and look at the moon. If there's a break in the clouds in the UK, it will be just slightly bigger. But no less beautiful a chunk of God's creation. If you're in the US, the eclipse is a wondrous thing to see. 

And if there's an earthquake don't blame me. I'm not saying there won't be one. What am I? A prophet?

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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.

Worship in the Etruscan Style

Thanks to Danwell for leading this afternoon's Worship in the Etruscan Style. In case we ever make the mistake of doing it again, some learnings I feel we should take from the event.

Yes, the Etruscans were from Etruria. That's not the suburb of Stoke. And even if it were, welcoming everyone in an attempted Brummie accent was not "sensitive to context." People from Stoke are not Brummies. They're more like Mancs, if you ask me.

The 'Etruscan Hymn Book' was very creative. But the Etruscans didn't use cuneiform as far as I'm aware. That was the Sumerians.

Even if the Etruscans had used cuneiform, that wasn't cuneiform. It was a load of triangular marks made by poking a stick in lumps of clay.

Lumps of clay that were still wet.

Lumps of wet clay that were dug out of the brook. It was filthy.

The sermon was not in "authentic ancient Etruscan." It was kind of Dutch. The kind of Dutch you might rip off Duolingo. I think I recognised the phrase "an important duck" at one point.

When a riot breaks out during an act of worship involving lumps of wet clay, a golf  umbrella is a good idea. Once they've run out of clay, you can hit people with it.

Other than that, yeah - pretty authentic.

Lines on the Closure of the Bree Louise

There's a pub near Camden Town (Camden Town)
The Government is pulling down (pulling down)
And the politicians haven't got a clue
Cos what's the point of HS2? (HS2)

The walls were painted bright vermillion (bright vermillion)
And somehow they outlived Carillion (Carillion)
The blokes with hi vis carry on the same
But we all know it's such a shame (such a shame)

Although the loos were rather smelly (rather smelly)
There was only beer names on the telly (on the telly)
And you could have a cider, have a chat
Now we're stuck with the Euston Tap (Euston Tap)

This project is Theresa's folly (Treesa's folly)
The gard'ners are no longer jolly (they're not jolly)
The trees are coming down in Euston Square
HS2 sows mis'ry everywhere (everywhere)

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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.

Nunc Dimittis

"Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
..... There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem."
(Luke 2)

There's a strange idea about. It says that the most evangelical churches are growing, and liberal churches are declining, and therefore God is blessing the evangelicals and everyone else does not have God's love.

It's not accurate, in the first instance, in the States for example - where the more traditional churches are now starting to decline just as the more liberal ones did. Though it's true that Churches in South America and Africa are growing, and that they are more conservative: they also have higher birth rates. This isn't the whole story either. The point I'm making is that this is a simple way of looking at a complex situation.

It's also a terrible way to look at the churches that have historically been lost. The churches of North Africa, were practically wiped out by the advance of Islam. The Christians of the Middle East are migrating - from Iraq, Syria, Israel, the Palestinian territories - because of persecution or their lives being made more difficult. These were faithful, traditional churches. And the disappearance of these churches is not because of their theology.  If they had been less conservative, they might have suffered less. Those who associate theology with numbers forget that Jesus told us to preach the Gospel to all nations - but also promised persecution would happen.

And there's the idea that churches must always be active - go-getting. Out on the street shouting the Good News at people who don't want to hear about it.

And then there's Simeon and Anna.

Simeon's been hanging round Jerusalem, because he knows that he will see the Messiah. But he doesn't seem to know when. So he's popping into the Temple to see. Maybe there's been years, he's been walking into the Temple every day. Waiting. Faithfully serving. Going out. Thinking he'll try again tomorrow. And so the years go by.

And Anna's even more unambiguous in her straightforward, dedicated perseverance. She never leaves the temple. She doesn't stop. She worships and prays, fasts, and waits. For years.

Worth remembering what Anna has seen through her long life. She was born roughly about the time that the King of Judea, Alexander Jannaeus, crucified 800 of his fellow-Jews in Jerusalem for rebellion. When she was a young woman, the Roman general Pompey invaded the city, broke down the wall of the Temple, and killed 12,0000 Jews. She's seen Herod become king. Seen the Temple rebuilt - a rebuilding that was still going on 30 or so years later when Jesus came back there again. And all the time that the Temple was rebuilt, the sacrifices continued. And Anna continued to worship.

The thing this two have shown is faithfulness. They have waited for the day they will see the Lord in his Temple.

And there in the Temple, this tiny thing. Herod called himself "The Great". Pompey was called "The Great". All the greatness of Rome had borne down on the little city of Jerusalem. And it was all nothing to Anna and Simeon. Instead, they see the tiny baby Mary brings, and they know. This is what they have waited for. This is why they have spent all their lives in patience, faithful waiting. The one for whom the Temple was built is here in Simeon's arms and nothing else matters.

They can go in peace. God's word has been fulfilled. They have seen God in his Temple. And they have been faithful servants.

We may have one task to do. We may have great things to do. We may be called to sacrifice, or to martyrdom. Or maybe just to wait. But as we keep our eyes on God, we can know. At the end, we will see God.

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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.

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.