Year in Refutile

Oh come, all ye fanciful...

It's one of the strange Christmas paradoxes (along with being 30 years old and watching 6 straight hours of Pixaardman cartoons or gut bubblingly awful episodes of some shit cake, money felch, cocktease game show because the word 'Christmas' has been dumped in front of the title and a bit of tinsel is draped across the studio. Come to think of it, there's something paradoxically dreary about good old shiny tinsel. It reminds me of a sort of enforced, Daily Mail Campaign underdoggery that forces us to clap along with the 'superdooperousness' of Christmas while costing 18 pounds a yard and looking a bit shit as a background to annual misery and passive aggressive family bickering) that at this time of year, my perception of the world both opens up and contracts at the same time, like a sea anemone with a personality crisis.

As I am reminded of the increasing size of my family due to apparently unceasing embryo production and also put in mind of the dismal size of the problems in the world (normally by cynically heartbreaking TV ads encouraging us to give 2 pounds a month instead of pushing obscene quantities of spun sugar into our cavernous head holes) in the same instance, I also feel the world closing in and my range of understanding contract. What's going on outside the realm of oven times, nibble quantities and the best time to put out the ruddy cheese cake because I hate it when it ends up going all mushy, seems a distant nightmare of sight and sound that I can barely make out in the middle distance, allowing me to bob my head back under the water and become soothed by the muffled screams of the lifeguards.

As I spent most of 2011 working in another country, returning to England in early December thrust me immediately into the clunking 'review of the year' hand wringing of newspapers, 4 hour talking head list shows (containing the absurd insights of mysterious comedians) and online photo gallery 2011 obituaries, which, rather than bring me pleasingly up to date, actually added to my sense of disconnection. As Noel Gallagher Version 101 once said; "The more I see the less I know, the more I know the less I understand" which sounds like a grim epitaph for society in general (or it would if we weren't too busy giggling at Royal arses or watching omnipresent perfume adverts that make you want to fall on your knees and pray for the apocalypse).

List shows are pretty anonymous and exist merely to fill your time with soundbite guff, but it's now essential for every channel or digital output medium to scratch around like they're CSI investigators, looking for that last crumb of insight or reduction to capture the feeling of the nation as though it would lead to some sort of glorious event horizon where all meaning is condensed into the single, one sentence opinion from Alan Whothefuckisthatguy from off the tellybox and all races, languages, opinions and facts deemed superfluous so at last we can all go home and I'm left free to establish my Empire (I think that's what they're doing...).

But it's not true. I feel absolutely fine not being able to reduce the London riots into 3 sentences. I actually feel quite satisfied that I have no ability to reconcile the cigar blowing, backslapping pandemonium surrounding the killing of Bin Laden and Gaddafi, whilst simultaneously condemning their own murderous lives. I'm glad I can't put my finger on the pulse of why we both stare through our electrical eye boxes, snickering into our elbows like five year olds, at the death of Kim Jong Il whilst looking the other way as North Korea starve their own people. I feel fine not weeping over the bubbling stew of a year, pleading for it to reduce into the kind of flavoursome jus that would delight the podgy faced, talking egg, greengrocer man from Masterchef.

Perhaps it's a symbol of a struggle to cope with the everyday problems and failures I encounter (failing to retain the receipt for overly snug trousers, suspicious breath tests, tasering strangers and murder charges) that there's a cold but intoxicating comfort in 'rounding up' the year into a drop down menu of 5 minute nostalgia fixes recounted by awkwardly haircutted giggle merchants collecting cash in return for reducing existence to less than 140 characters. Having seen uprisings, fighting, natural disasters of inconceivable power, hacking, humping, injunctions and Royal functions, a never ending picture postcard slideshow of the 'best and worst' of the year seems vastly superior to the horrors of actually having to live through it.

So here's my best of and worst of list of 2011:

Best thing: All of it

Worst thing: All of it.... and Piers Morgan. Obviously.

Cheerio my lovelies, see you for tea and sandwiches on the next episode of Life:The Movie. I've seen the trailer and it looks crap and brilliant all at the same time. Must be a paradox.

IcantstanditIknowyouplanneditI'mgonnasetitstraightthiswatergate xxxx

National Fail

Deck the halls with boughs of folly....

Here's a jolly festive quiz for you: What does this blog, the career trajectory of Tinie Tempah, the continuing TV presence of Tess Daley and Nation Rail Travel all have in common? Time's ticking... tick, tick, tick. (Adopts patronising, student baiting Paxman voice) "Come on, let's have your answer now..."

The answer is that they are far more incomprehensible than they have any right to be. (Oh yes. that really is the best I could come up with to start off the blog, but they can't all be winners can they?) Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Nation Rail Enquiries Help Line is some sort of sideways glancing, Shakespearean aside to the continuing farce of my life. The name 'help line' is itself a textbook example of knockabout comedy, consisting as it does of a useless voice recognition system which has no ability to understand a single word you're saying unless you bellow like a mental lost in a wood or speak so slowly and clearly that passers by think you're trying to instruct an elderly relative how to manoeuvre themselves to the toilet by mobile phone.

For example, the simple act of finding a train from York to Birmingham went as follows:

Help line: Welcome to National Rail Enquiries. So, which station are you travelling from?

Me: York.

HL: (continuing, oblivious) For example, if you want to travel from Leicester, say Leicester.

Me: York.

HL: I'm sorry, was that "Dunstable"?

Me: No.

HL: If you want to travel from Dunstable, say "Yes"

Me: NO.

HL: OK, where are you travelling from?

Me: York.

HL: OK, I'll look for trains from Liverpool Lime Street.

Me: NOOOOOOO

(How is that even possible? York is a monosyllabic city in the North East of England. There's 3 different words in Liverpool Lime Street!!!)

HL: (2 second pause) Can you repeat that?

Me: Listen to me my robot friend, I do not wish to travel from Liverpool or anywhere even near Liverpool and, in addition, I'd like to find the actor who supplied the voice for this pitiful system, go to his house, murder everyone in his family, then use the sharpened edge of a SPAM tin to cut his stomach open and spill his dinner into the bath like a student after a heavy night out puking up her guts into a handbag.

HL: OK, that's great. I'll look for services from York....

Me: (No words, just the sound of me opening up my jugular with my own coat zipper)

My attempts to use this service and potentially discover the exact time a train will miraculously and arbitrarily appear became so ball crushingly infuriating that I decided to throw caution to the wind and rock up at the station, sans ticket, sans hope, sans everything. I became a soldier of fortune, bravely facing up to potential random ticket inspection and irritating little barriers that, although cutting you off at the waist (and thus being as effective a barrier against ticket dodging as whistling is to a prolonged nuclear assault) appear to be a forcefield of terrifying strength and mystical power.

I'm no bean counter or right wing social crusader but I'm pretty sure that infinite half bearded, Adidas promoting, slack faced cornholes before me have been absolutely fine with not buying a ticket and probably travelled uninhibited to their chosen destination (casino / dog track / crown court) mainlining Carling and uttering unintelligible profane slurs. I felt it was about my time for a slice of the action, as only a middle class champagne socialist could think that not paying for a train ticket is in any way 'action'.

I hopped on a waiting train with a lump of adrenaline in my veins like gristle and a slice of non-conformist pie in my belly, only to be immediately confronted by a planet arsed, humourless ticket inspector with the look of a Bulgarian shot-putter about her and murder in her eyes. As it became clear from my embarrassed shuffling and sorrowful mutterings to the tune of "can I buy a ticket from you..." she didn't exactly have a hardened criminal on her hands and as such spoke to me like I was a five year old who'd waited too long at the Tesco's checkout to tell mummy I had to 'do a toilet' and had dumped a wad of filth into my dungarees.

I managed to purchase the ticket from her and immediately became self conscious of looking like some scumbag who'd tried to cheat the same system everyone else was obediently conforming to. In my head, they had me pegged as the reason travel prices were on the rise; I was the type of junkyard punk who rioted in the streets and caused some corporate office literally 0.2% of diminished returns; I was to be hated, feared and cast out of the window immediately. Needless to say, I didn't consider that I was in any way responsible for my own ridiculousness. That would have been the easy way out, of course. That ticket inspector was now my enemy. Nemesis.

Of course, my feelings subsided and I remembered that I was in fact a massive idiot-o-bot who equated the failure of a simple enquiry system to my own decision not to buy a ticket and subsequently look like a bit of a tit. By immediately creating a 'bad guy' I gave myself an easy excuse which allowed me to differ my own guilt long enough to scoff down the rest of my chicken pasty and look at my reflection in the window without wanting to hurl it all back up and write 'cock eyes' in the chickeny spew with my forefinger, like any sane person would have done.

It worries me that there was something comforting in creating an enemy to pin my failures on, as we seem to do it readily when dealing with larger scale events. Rioters on the streets of London? - it's common looking thugs not cultural inequalities and youth disenfranchisement. Can't find anyone to shoot for attacking us? - it's evil Saddam, not spoilt brattish oil gathering and distraction mongering. Economy falling in around our ears like the conclusion of an Indiana Jones film? - it's (booooo) Fred Goodwin, not a house of cards monetary system that makes pyramid selling look like Wall Street's wet dream. Someone's always to blame, but that someone is conveniently never us.

It suits our desire to feel secure to deflect guilt onto a nemesis, but dooms us to remain insulated from uncomfortable or difficult truths. Luckily, creating a comedy 'Satan' onto which our fears can be projected is something the media jumps all over the chance to do for us, which is handy. All the while, it becomes harder and harder to render an informed debate, regardless of your opinions, because lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) are around every corner and behind every tree. Eventually every issue and newsworthy event will be reduced to 'goodies' and 'baddies' and we're forced to sit impotently booing and cheering on command, like red necks at a wrestling match.

As a result, I have decided to give up on hatred and become the hated by spending my mornings pushing razor blades into birds nests, placing soft toys slightly out of the reach of babies and eating panda hearts. I prefer things on this side of the nemesis equation. As Calvin once said, "virtue definitely needs some cheaper thrills".

We'llmeetagaindontknowwheredontknowwhen xxx

Euro Trash

Don't look blog in anger...

Did those feet in ancient times walk across England's mountains green? I seriously doubt it, as the owner of the feet in question is a potentially fictional 30 year old male born in Palestine 2000 years ago, a time noted for being notoriously difficult to obtain cheap air fares or quality budget coach travel due to substandard Holy Land broadband. Mr Of Nazareth had no desire to spend hours on Expedia, for it was written, he had little tolerance for pop up adds and was easily distracted by CountenanceBook.

Despite containing enough historical inaccuracy to make Braveheart look like a Simon Schama 98 part documentary on the history of lambing in Wales, the stirring words of Jerusalem inspire nationalistic chest pumping and eye reddening, Union Jack humping fervour until you feel ready to munch down a Yorkshire pudding sandwich and invade France, brandishing a cutlass from the back of a milk float.

It makes me wonder if David Whatamaroon had accidentally flicked his iPod on shuffle this week and spent 2 hours listening to Margaret Thatcher's Hymntime Karaoke Songbook with Jerusalem on repeat, before landing in Brussels and making a bit of a spectacle out of himself in the best traditions of a man so consumed by self promotion and wax faced posturing that, like a 14 year old farting during school assembly, felt the need to turn all the attention on 'me, me, me' in the hope of appearing vaguely relevant, a notion which flies in the face of public and political perception.

The effect of DC comic exercising his veto at the Euro Summit has been seen by some as a mere gesture of independence from a Eurozone crisis that is outside our remit due to the UK's none participation in the single currency. This shields us from two key points that have short and longer term significance for us and Europe. The first is that by turning the meeting into a crisis of the European Union, the political debate surrounding how the Euro can be saved was pushed to the sidelines and turned into a row between 'us and them'. The Euro remains precarious, as Germany and France are now essentially guard dogs and CCTV bullies checking the homework of profligate nations who failed to balance their books. However, as stated in the Guardian's Editorial;

"that founding economic analysis is of only limited relevance to Greece – and no help at all in dealing with Spain and Ireland, both of whose slumps stem from housing and lending bubbles"

It appears that the cracks in the currency are being papered over by the big guns of Europe rather than providing a solution to the long term issues facing a single currency tripping balls, throwing a whitey and sitting on the floor of the cubical trying to regain it's equilibrium before the bouncers wade in and chuck it out. There is still no central bank for the Euro and no treaty in place to form one, leaving the big economies free to rule the roost, dish out sanctions to over-spenders, but doomed to scratch their heads should the fault lie elsewhere.

The second problem with viewing this as 'not our fight' is that it's easy to overlook the significance of our old chum Dave bringing the Euro sceptic dinosaurs a prezzie back from his holiday to stop them grumbling over having to share the Government canteen with the Lib Dems. The country suddenly becomes even more insular, isolated and bitter, essentially locking ourselves in our bedroom and listening to Marilyn Manson records dreaming of a time when we can trade with ourselves and ignore those Europeans who 'just don't understand'.

It all makes me wonder how long the Liberal Democrats will sit quietly like castrated puppies or if they've actually morphed into some sort of post-modern art installation, commenting on modern life by expressing everything and nothing simultaneously in a bewildering volley of comment without content. In fact, the coalition appears to be experimenting in a breed of anti-politics where the opposing concepts of power and dissent are gradually removed from the political process, leaving a silent and turgid hegemony which lacks the brazen wrongness of totalitarianism in favour of an impotent perma-government.

None of this is particularly relevant at street level, where the dark satanic mills of civil unrest, riot hangovers, pension cuts and an inequalities gap the size of Bournemouth are of more immediate concern. But it makes me wonder how long we're going to be stuck with a non-government, more concerned with sellotaping itself together than actually identifying a strategy to haul us out of this economic bum pit.

At least we can count on big Dave to fight for Britain at home, as well as on the European stage. Unless of course, the whole meeting turned out to be a bit of a 'damp squib'. Oh well...

Imissyourface xx

Blog To The Future

Hiya, what's this...? Blogging again...? Jeeeeeeezus

When the scientists who first dreamed up the large hadron collider at CERN first got together around the kitchen table (do scientists who build large hadron colliders - or even mini colliders - get together around kitchen tables? I like to think of them sitting around their in-house bars, on stools shaped like beer barrels, dipping their wispy beards into mugs of foamy home brew, whilst giggling about smashing stuff together and using words beyond my comprehension like 'science', 'collide' and 'achievement'. Am I getting off the point a bit? Sorry) did they realise then that their discussions and the ramifications of those ale infused chats would in time lead to incomprehensibly important discoveries that open up new and exciting frontiers in a phenomenally boring way?

One would imagine so, as science is the study of cause, effect and observation. Each step taken on the road which started with the discovery of fire has led inevitably to each new horizon as the blinkers of ignorance are trumped. The men and women working on the colliderscopeotron had achieved all they could on paper and the time had come to build a massive thingy to test it all out. This in turn will lead to decades of people sitting around kitchen tables, using what their predecessors observed at CERN to make their own innumerable fag packet calculations and figure out the next big thingy they have to make (please let it be cooler next time - is using a DeLorean really so hard?).

My point is that these people have purpose. Those who went before them laid down their discoveries on paper for the next generation to pick up and carry forwards, unrestricted by the technology of the past. Einstein wrote a bit and had funny hair, meaning that the bloke from D:Ream could write a bit more and have slightly better hair. They had vision, purpose and despite being isolated on the cliff face of discovery and battered by the winds of conformity, they were driven to excel. They have vocation, they have ambition, they have a selection of delicious cheesy snacks to get them through late night sessions trying to make X = something giddy.

I have returned to England from the comfort, guaranteed income and hedonism of living in Saigon this week and face a challenge to build my own metaphorical CERN. Coming home gives rise to the usual ponderings, especially when faced with the big question: "So, what are you doing now?". Frankly my dears, I don't have a clue. If I was a welder, I'd start welding things together. If I was a plumber, I'd plumb things. If I was a drug dealer, I'd move to Rugby. But I'm not, and I wont (although option 3 is always a possibility - it's a sellers market).

As it is, I'm part of a generation of lost little puppies who are on the cusp of larking about and getting their shit together. Overeducated and underemployed, we wonder the bedroom harvesting opinions from Guardian blogs and posting artistic mish mash scavenged from YouLube in an attempt to appear 'connected' and not at all hollow eyed insomniacs suckling at the internet crack pipe, jealously 'Icoulddothat'ing at all the smart arses getting rich off blogging or actually achieving things while we silently stare at a luminous laptop screen waiting for our Pot Noodles to cool down.

Still, I've only been back a week and a half, so it's not time for panic just yet. I'm still feeling the cold and people are still honestly asking and appearing to be interested in my Saigon adventures. But it can't be long before a single mention of 'noodle soup' at a restaurant will cause my mates to leap across the table and use a funnel to force lighter fluid into my windpipe before setting my vocal chords on fire until they pop like pork fat under a hot grill. Actually, my pals are so polite it will probably go the other way and they'll smile and nod while secretly pushing steak knives into their thighs in an attempt to stave off the narcolepsy.

I'm glad to be home, I'm glad to see seasons again and not be the walking freak show who's twelve feet taller than everybody in the country. Now if I could just channel this into something productive I'd be a'OK. The time for talking is over. It's action stations. It's Countdown.... oooooo.

Th'Th'Th'Th'Thatsallfolks xx

Rich's Wanderful: Underwater Cycling

Bloging from Miami Beach, B.O.A.C,

The United Kingdom, Atlantis, Ho Chi Minh City and Robert Maxwell... what do they all have in common? Currently all of the above are lurking below a considerable amount of precipitation with no hint of an end in sight.

So while the UK version might be the cuddly-wuddly, roll it into a ball and stick a carrot in it, sliding down hilltops, pensioner murdering, chillier than Mr. Frostie's handle, frozen kind; here in HCMC we are still labouring under the literal and figurative cloud of a never ending rainy season.

There's real problems with the rains here, most of which are linked to the ZX Spectrum powered, city electricity structure collapsing like a foppish uncle with the vapours every time the sky 'looks a bit Lancashire'. The other problems are to do with the aftermath, as the immediate flooding of the major city streets prevents you getting anywhere (which, if you're somewhere with a cocktail hour, isn't too bad) and even when the streets do clear, walking on them becomes a process about as pleasant as cleaning your toilet with your bare feet while a cackling Ferne Cotton plucks your eyelashes out with her grimy fingers.

In Saigon's constant mission to always be counter intuitive, rain doesn't clear the streets of filth and grime, rather it brings up the cess and cack and detritus to the surface like blood to a beaming child's ruddy cheeks on a cold day. In this way, the personality of Saigon will always remain intrinsically linked to the stench.

My flatmate recently made a diary of the aroma's around Saigon, which basically boiled down to:

Monday: Toilet, rotting flesh, over ripe fruit, beer, poo

Tuesday: Toilets, rotting flesh, fruit, beer, sick and poo.

Wednesday: Toilets, flesh, fruit, beer, sick, poo and just a hint of lavender.

It's quite a thing to autosave a list of disgusting things to your hard drive so you can reproduce them in your blog (just ask Leslie Grantham) but it is absolutely true that Saigon smells like nothing, nor anywhere else that I've been, read smell biographies about, or had some street grime sent to me from.

If, perchance you disagree and wish to send me some filth from your city or town, then please do so. Perhaps we could have a low budget X - Factor where some piles of shite are paraded as entertainment. We can call it "Britain's Got Talent" ('parp').

Wakemeupbeforeyougogocusimnotplanninongoinsolo.

xxx

Rich's Wanderful: Pho Kit

GOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING VIET..... oh, sod it.

Through time, the great philosophers (Socrates, Nietzsche, Kyle) have all mused on the life of a man through reasoned consideration of the human experience and lie detector tests. Great literature is constantly preoccupied with the cyclical nature of the human experience. In the mater bothering, eye gouging, orgy of Oedipus Rex, the Sphinx posed the riddle of the three ages of man; In Twelfth Night, Feste the clown muses that 'What's to come is still unsure', and the Very Hungry Caterpillar had to eat his way through 1 red apple, 2 green pairs, 3 purple plums, 4 red strawberries, 5 whole oranges, a cake, a salami, a swiss cheese, ice-cream, cherry pie a whole watermelon and a single leaf before he could realise his full flutterby potential. It's a fable which is either a nuanced rhetoric on the importance of experience to formulation of the psyche, or Kerry Katona's daily 'to do' list.

So it is with these musings in mind that once again my feet have itched like Usain Bolt's slippers and I have relocated the blog to the streets of Ho Chi Minh city, better known as Saigon. Like the US army, various stoned pack-packers and a very successful Vespa sales rep before me, I now find myself pitched up in this often filmed but little visited city in the South of Vietnam.

The tedium and tiredness of a 16 hour journey (highlight = the peanuts) quickly gave way to befuddled anxiety when I reached the Vietnamese boarder control and realised that the local immigration processes were probably sketched on the back of a fag packet and hidden in a safe that everyone was looking for the key to. Scrawny, clueless looking officials in ill fitting olive green shirts stood around attempting to adjust their frowns just enough to convince their superiors that they were taking it all very seriously and not standing around idly while a gazillion new arrivals jostle pointlessly for some indication of what the bloody hell was going on.

In front of me in the queue were two Chinese Monks apparently failing miserably to be allowed to go about their business. The argument which followed regarding the legitimacy of their papers took approximately 14 hours and so many officials that it appeared that they were recruiting, training and dispatching new officers to add to the futile squabble. After a while they were led off to another room, presumably to be frowned at in new and exciting ways, leaving me free to approach the counter, cough up my $50 and be waved instantly through. Money definitely speaks louder than mixed metaphors in this part of the woods.

Once I was able to leave the airport, I was feeling sweatier than Satan's jock strap, so to get into the icy, air conditioned cab was exquisite. The heat is almost terrifying, because it seems to suck all the air out of the room, leaving you with only a kind of moist stew which occasionally allows oxygen to enter your lungs. Sweat beads gather on glasses, on shirts, around your wrist watch and if you wear tight pants, you might as well cut out the middle man and simply boil your gonads in warm marmalade.

In this type of oppression, the last thing you want is to be swapping barely understandable platitudes with a hotel owner in the middle of the back-packer district of Saigon whilst wondering if the ten thousand or so locust-like scooters which swam the city streets are actually participating in a kind of live action Grand Theft Auto where the mission is to attempt to fracture your spine with a wing-mirror.

Still, as a hotelier, Mr. Binh is friendly enough. The only real draw back is his increasingly hostile attempts to sell you whatever shite he was able to pick up off ebay the previous week. Sim cards, chocolate, water, fags, T-shirts, tactical nuclear weapons. He's so excited to have a captive audience of bewildered teachers to flog his wares to he actually leaps from buttock to buttock in his chair with excitement if anyone so much as shows a passing interest. His reaction to a knock back is more disappointment than anger, but don't feel sorry for him. The mark up is at least 50% and the quality is at least -40%. Who said business was difficult? - think of a number, double it, sell it. If you can't do that, you're fired.

So over the next week I'll actually start teaching English to the little darlings of Vietnam, which should provide ample distraction from the fifty cent beers, trying to count money in the millions and blocking up the holes in the walls from the gathering armies of furious looking ants.

More updates to follow - probably in their thousands. In the meantime, remember, this is the country where 'five dollar' can get you some things, but it still can't get you through customs.

Saigoneroaming xx

Return

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to blog...

Blinking, red eyed, white skinned and looking leaner than a butchers dog after a weekend at a swanky health spa, eating hummus sausages and playing mixed doubles with Cheryl Cole and Lassie, I finally emerge from the dark cavern of my blog-exile and launch into the second phase of the life and times of the reservation.

This is indeed the second phase of my project to bring whimsy, foolhardy rhetoric and misleading opinion to the masses. Actually, when I say masses, I'm referring to you, the tens of people who actually take the time out to read this grim nonsense.

You make me very happy and sad in almost equal measures mainly because I worry that to some people I must be at least as entertaining as stalking ex-girlfriends on Facebin, losing to the computer at chess in 9 seconds and looking for ways to avoid the NSFW tag and avoid detection from the morality police (i.e. your boss at work). I feel the weight of responsibility to match the entertainment value in these wholesome pursuits and spend my nights shivering and wailing that I can't live up to the expectations.

Luckily for me, since my last blog, quite a bit of excitement has been taking place in the wacky world. Oh boy, hasn't it been fun? There's plenty to enjoy out there, like 6 month Chilean potholing expeditions, the George Michael driving school, BP vs. the World and the Pope-aid concert tour. Eventually, I fear that the spending cuts imposed by the gay pin up couple (Cleggover and Camoron) may lead to some actual news being deposited on the telly box, and Natasha Kaplinsky will have to switch her robt face to the matronly 'stern face' setting to report on the 3 day week and public sector walk outs. While it's still the silly season, we can keep ugly things like 'facts', 'debate' and 'information' out of the news, and look at Katy Perry's magnificent swirrling ass instead. Mmmm. Twirrly.

I'm guessing that to some people the visit of the Pope to these shores is significantly newsworthy. In fact, so much time and reverence is being dedicated to Benedictators trip, that the Daily Mail hasn't even mentioned another foreigner on these shores driving down house prices. The BBC has even wheeled out a special 'Pope 2010' graphic to accompany their reports.

You know the BBC are getting serious when they enlist the work experience kid with an A-Level in Fonts, to make some curly graphic appear behind the newsreader, but ultimately making News at 10 look like a low budget PowerPoint presentation by a biscuit company salesman on the quality of Bourbon sales in Scunthorpe. Thus is the power of the Pope. Look upon his wonders and despair.

Well, actually I have despaired a little bit. The trip has been largely a mask of mass public mass delivered with all the mediocrity that attending an open air gig starring Carol Vorderman, Susan Boyle and an old man in a hat could possibly provide. All they needed to do was to add Daniel Bedingfield and Sooty to the bill to make it so boring that members of the congregation start melting each others faces with pilgrim candles just for something to do.

There's a typically British feeling to the way the visit has been staged, lacking the pizazz and balls out, dick swinging largess of an American event, or the class, tradition and reverence of religious events in Europe. We always seem to find a way of giving a large scale event a touch of middle management, patting each other on the back for 'staging this scale of event so very bloody well' whilst the whole thing looks like it's taking place on the main stage of a minor peace festival in the Cotswold's, attended by badminton enthusiasts and sponsored by Muller Rice.

However, underneath all of this, the whole even is stalked by the spectre of the systematic cover up of paedophilia in the church, making the pale white plastic staging look all the more desperate. The mire that the Catholic church has become central to in its role covering up the mess it's responsible for resolving, shows how reluctant mass organisations are to confronting and dealing with their own failures. The head of the Church is seen as God's representative so can't exactly resign, however great the pressure becomes. The scandal is one thing, the cover up quite another. It is always in the cover-up that the true evil becomes exposed, as the people who know but do nothing become as culpable as the monsters perpetrating the crime.

Whatever your views on the church in general, the central idea of faith (be good, treat others as yourself, take responsibility, help the weak) are good values to live by in a socially responsible world. If you want to add having a finger wagged at you by a mythical man in the sky to the mix, then who the devil am I to argue the why's and wherefores. I don't care if you think Noel Edmond's is is judging you from the back of a tortoise made of ham or that we all live inside the anus of Anneka Rice, if you live by the principles of being quite nice to people and not stealing my crisps, then as far as I'm concerned, you're A-OK.

Religion, however, is a very different horse to 'faith'. Religion is hierarchy, corporate responsibility and fund raising. Religion is political, personal, furious and moralistic. It decrees war, outlaws contraception, builds monasteries, desecrates monasteries, chases people down the street, forgets to flush the toilet, gets newsprint in the carpet and hides in places you wouldn't expect then jumps out at you giving you quite the fright. Religion causes as many problems as it solves and as such, like dairylea dunkers and The Pussycat Dolls, the Pope isn't necessarily a good idea.

But, he's here now whatever I think about it, so it's time for him to offer support and offer an ear to the victims of hideous crimes committed by servants to his church. If change comes as a result then this Pope could be seen as a great man, who faced up to and conquered a culture of protection and obstruction. I fear though that all that will come to pass is tedious distraction, pretty fonts and a selection of Pope related merchandise intended to bore us into distraction.

So all that's left to say is a big welcome back to the reservation. Follow me. The alternative isn't too good.

Solongandthanksforallthefish xx