Roll

When I was a kid they were buns. I’m not sure who was responsible for this terminology, since to all the other children they were rolls. My Geordie Dad is suspect number one, though food was normally “named” by my Mum, if only because she did more with it. My Dad’s relationship with food was purely as an end user.

I don’t mean my Mum named food. We didn’t have a tin of tuna called Harold, or a loaf of bread called Gunhilda, though we almost certainly should have done. The world seems divided up into those things that you are allowed to name – pets, cars, pot plants, boats, stuffed animals, genitals*, bicycles, mystical swords etc – and things that you are not – trees, curtains, knees, staplers**, non-mystical swords, fog, socks etc. Who makes up these rules anyway? Can I fight back by naming the rule that stops you calling things by a human name something? Can I call it Mary?

Conventions are being undermined all the time. There’s a TV channel called Dave, and that’s also the name of a friend’s dog. Somewhere out there is a geranium called Simon. And a gerbil called Derek. That’s all well and good, but when are we going to get a human called Pipsqueak?

Possibly when Peaches Geldof becomes a mother.

* Honest to God I have no pet name for my penis. But having said that I’d be absolutely horrified if any of my friends admitted to having one (a name for it, that is), so you have no reason to trust me on this.

** Though I did once have a stapler called Maureen.

Polish

Somewhere there's some sort of equivalent blog by a fan of Nick Griffin. If he sees this word he's going to come up with a very different piece.

One of my most ineffectual teachers was called Mr Sheen, like the polish. He taught biology. In theory biology should have been my favourite science - I quite liked the natural world as a school child and knowing how it all fit together is theoretically more interesting than knowing the specific head capacity of iron filings. Unfortunately, Mr Sheen was not the kind of man to imbue his subject with any joy. He was particularly unforgivable for turning a blind eye one year as the class bully moved his stool behind me and punched me regularly in the back of the head.

He also had a slight speech impediment, something I wouldn't mention if it was for the whole blind-eye-to-violence thing, but it was a little hard to stay interested through a talk about invertebwates wepwoducing. Still, we got to experiment with beans and blotting paper. I do hope that everyone got to experiment with beans and blotting paper, not because it was fun, but because if it wasn't standard teaching practice then I'm very scared as to why anyone wanted me to germinate a bean in a jar.

Still, I suppose it prepared me for an adulthood where about 75% of all the vegetables I buy have sprouted before I remember I own them. It's good to know exactly what's going on.

Gesture

4 years ago I sat in Sydney Cricket Ground watching as England got their arses kicked to the tune of a 5-0 Ashes whitewash.

Although most of my Australian friends were fairly sympathetic, one in particular decided to taunt me for the rest of my trip by gesturing at me with his hands and mouthing the score. Five fingers would go up, followed by the fingers and thumb shaped into an O as he soundlessly uttered "Five Nil!"

In 2009, when England retook the Ashes, I sent him message: "I'll admit that 5-0 is still a better scoreline," I said. "But 2-1 is a better hand gesture".

Sadly trying to turn "a record three innings defeats" is going to require someone fluent in sign-language to sort out.

Do you get the feeling I'm a bit fixated on the cricket at the moment? I do.

Brilliant

Ah, a fortuitous time for this word. I'm sat on the sofa watching the footage of England maneuvering themselves into a winning position and getting ready to watch them win a series in Australia.

There'll be a fair few people my age (or younger, since I was a late starter) who will remember the 1986/7 tour as their introduction to cricket played on a foreign field. That tour was a first time I stayed up with a radio next to my bed listening to the crackly coverage and it's list of exotic place names (or so I thought when I was 14). I foolishly thought the ease with with we shifted Tim Zoehrer would apply to all English cricket; instead I was treated to 25 years of Ian Healy, Adam Gilchrist and even Brad bloody Haddin rescuing the Aussies on those rare occasions when our bowlers were good enough. And of course most of the time we just had our bowling heads kicked in by Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh, Dean Jones, Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer or any number of ready to roll off the production line batting geniuses that the Australians seemed to be able to pick at will.

Now Ponting's ludicrous 5-0 revenge in 2006/7, which at the time appeared to be an act of will more than cricket, now looks instead like an act of monumental sporting arrogance. The Aussie determination to not only reclaim the Ashes but to crush England for their temerity in 2005 meant that - unusually for them - they failed to introduce younger players into the team as they went. The 5-0 became an enormous bee-sting: it hurt England badly, but did Australian cricket suffer more? The bee is certainly looking a little bit sickly.

Ah, what do I know? All I *do* know is that after all these years it's absolutely brilliant to see England winning in Australia, and doing it as much through their own excellence as Australia's weaknesses. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.

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.