Believing

I'm in the grip - every so slightly - of a religious crisis.

This is quite hard to carry off if you're not religious, but I'm doing my best. It's probably more to do with my massive distrust of certainty and people who display it. While this normally involves me hating the Pope and Mrs Thatcher, this Christmas I'm getting more bothered by atheists.

Atheists are *not* the same as agnostics, who I love since if they were actually a religion and needed a gesture equivalent of the Catholic crossing of one's self would be to give a gentle shrug.

Our father, who might just possibly be in heaven.
Hallowed be thy name, though obviously you don't have one. Certainly not in this prayer. That's a bit of an oversight, isn't it?
Thy kingdom be available to believers of other faiths or none
As they possibly are right about all this and you may not exist at all or at least not in the way presented by generations of Judeo-Christian scholars
Thy will be done as it is in heaven, which is a great get-out clause because if heaven doesn't exist then your will won't be done, in which case that will be just fine.
Give us this day our daily bread, but if not we'll just make it ourselves or get it from Tesco's...

Etc

But I'm struggling with two things lately. The first is a few friends who've been heading off to "Godless Carols". The idea of trying to strip Christmas of any remaining religious overtones after years of steadily suffocating commercialisation hits me as about as necessary as launching a campaign to eradicate the letter "H" in the speech of Essex school children. It's happening anyway, and frankly you're making yourself look weird.

The second is that this actually made me angry*. Not because they're necessarily wrong, or that I even disagree with most of it - Creationists are scary bastards and should stay out of our schools. If God exists he'll survive scientists, after all. But principally it's the bit about how atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.

I'll believe that when I see non-stamp collectors make a short film about how people shouldn't collect stamps and that everyone who does is a cunt. Or when people post on Facebook that they're heading off to buy a "stampless" stamp-album. I found that little video to be screamingly smug and so full of its own righteousness that it made me wonder how long it would be before we have our own atheist suicide bomber.

I recognise that the rise of of the Christian right and creationists in America requires response, but we don't have them over here, instead we have millions of people who believe in all sort of things (and are treated equally nonetheless), some of them, every now again, perfectly reasonable.

So leave off all the stuff about believing in invisible men in the sky being mental: now mater how seductive a viewpoint, it's intolerant. And if you've got a problem with the religious aspects of Christmas, don't sing fucking carols in the first place.


* yes, I was a bit surprised at my reaction too

Great

I now use the word "great" exclusively in an ironic* way.

I'm sure at one point it was a word that might have come forth in order to appreciate the wonders of life and the universe, like "brilliant" and (if you're from Essex and in your late 30s) "skill". But now it just crops up at the end of statements like "Well, that's just great" or all alone with overtones of Blackadderian despair.

Great.

However, I still admire it's tricky homophonic qualities, and will never forget the email I once read from a disgruntled former employee who had railed against her boss for not defending her from being made redundant. She made much play of how this boss would be unable to cope without her due to his tendency to be disorganised and - crucially - misspell everything, a flaw that she would heroinically mend with her attention to detail and, er, encyclopedic grasp of the dictionary.

The subject heading?

Ungreatful.

Perhaps she, too, was being ironic.



* all right, I mean "sarcastic", but irony sounds so much more sophisticated.

Midnight

I have fallen out of love with midnight. We've been seeing less and less of each other, and now I don't think about her much. We used to spend quality time, but now I'm mostly asleep when she comes round. It was nice while it lasted, and maybe we'll work things out, but I've starting hanging around with dawn, and even though it's a bit of a love-hate relationship there's something mesmerising about her and she makes me look at the world in a different way. She's also really accepting of me watching cricket in other time zones, and I tend to drink less with her around. It's all very boring and grown up but it's what I need at the moment.

But I miss you midnight. Maybe see you later.

Director

I've signed up to another play. It's another Shakespearean bit-part, so I might need to make sure I do something very different soon*, but it won't require much effort and I should be able to learn the lines in the twenty minute interval between the end of the Verve's "Urban Hymns" and the bit with the spooky baby crying.

I would have liked a bigger part, obviously, but this cameo thing does have it's advantages - I'm much less like to reach the stage where I want to kill the Director. Not a personal slight on the *actual* Director, it must be said, but merely an honest reflection of how I have felt about most of the ones with which I have previously worked. As a sub-species, Directors tend to display a debilitating mixture of narcissism, narcissism and - very occasionally - narcissism. Whether it manifests itself in long, droning, opinionated verbal meanderings, attempting to control every aspect of an actor's performance ("puppet theatre") or an ability to understand that their play is not the most important thing in the universe, there's nothing more that the average Director deserves more for Christmas than a punch in the face.

But the real reason I'm reticent is because my last proper Director was really nice. It was like finding a Tory that doesn't like to spit at poor people, or an England cricket team that can beat Australia. I'm very worried that the next one will be like Perth - a crushing disappointment. But I'm sure they won't. And if they are, I won't have to put up with it for very long. Commitmentphobe actors - just what the world needs more of.

* yes, even non-professionals** get type cast
** amateur scum