A valediction

Just a couple of odes tonight.

The first, dedicated to Blair's Babes, some of whom have betrayed every good woman (and man) who voted for them, because in the end they behaved like the sort of men they always claimed to be superior to:

She smashed her way through the glass ceiling,

and she jumped some impossible fences,

but Babe though she was,

She tripped up, becos

of the lure of enormous expenses.

And the second, to the holder of the most dignified and respected seat in the House of Commons, the Speaker - impartial; wise; - and, oh bugger it, he is the worst Speaker for 400 years and a disgrace to all good and thinking Glaswegians and people of humble origins in general, and how he survived this long is anybody's guess. It was he, you will recall, who wanted to bring the police in - not to identify those MPs who have been lining their pockets (though within the rules, I have to say, ho-ho-ho) at the expense of us pensioners and other trusting but dumb voters, but to find the whistleblower who had dared to reveal all the the Daily Telegraph.  The moral vacuum occupied by him and MPs in general - any one of whom could have exposed this crooked little expenses racket, because they all knew it was going on, even if they weren't part of it, but didn't - is what the Archbishop of Canterbury could have addressed - but didn't.

The truly appalling thing is that they genuinely don't understand why their behaviour has aroused such anger and resentment.  They are insulated from the real world of minimal pensions, inadequate health care, bad neighbours, muggings, no-go areas and dog-shit. They thought they weren't being paid enough, so they invented an expenses system that would give them what they wanted but would be out of the sight of the people who voted them into office.  

But our anger about the Westminster expenses fiddle isn't only about money, but about trust - not in our elected representatives as people, but in the system that we used to call democracy. Now, it seems, public service, to the Sunday-shopping, Sunday football generation of MPs and MEPs, is not what they can give, but what they can grab. It is our trust in the system of electoral representation that has been shattered, and for them to hope that they can get the bobbies in to pull up the portcullis before anyone notices is a hope too far. The emperor has been revealed, and he is all pink and pathetic in his birthday suit.

So an ode for him who presided over this mess and was complicit in it:

"It's a tairrrible thing", said the Speaker,

"And I still blame it all on that leaker -

Ma hoose ran, by Jiminy, 

on sleaze, graft and simony -

but ma future noo could'nae be bleaker."

Choir expenses, tra-la

 

  

Let me say at the outset that the RSCM has pretty severe guidelines on expenses for backbench choristers.  Second homes nearer the church, moat clearing and 59-inch digital dog biscuits are definitely out, and so is that odd tin of Brillo for the medals, polishing of, that frontbenchers manage to wangle out of the Organ Fund.  Not even throat sweets or nard for the tonsils can we claim.  In fact, if you read the very fine print in our Articles of Affiliation to the RSCM, you will find that not only can we not claim a penny for anything at all, but we are expected to contribute generously towards repairs to the fabric of our 1923 cassocks and that of our local 1123 cathedral, not to mention the RSCM officials' annual jaunt to New Brighton (which we're not supposed to know about.)

 

Now this is clearly all wrong.  All that guff about stewardship and lay ministry is all very well, but do they realise that lay clerks at Llandaff in the 16thC were paid a groat per service (albeit a Welsh groat), and half-pay for choir practices, which equates to about £1500 a week today?  So, in the absence of a decent incremental salary scale, I thought I'd better go on the PCC and, you know, nudge nudge, get the inside dope on how to work the expenses system, so as not actually to have to write a whole new hymnal of heavily copyrighted doggerel and geetar choons like  everybody else does.

 

Well, what a waste of time.  I learnt absolutely nothing that I could pass on to a few old friends in Another Place in return for a few favours.  They are already moaning that the good old days are over and are anxiously seeking new employment, usually with foreign companies who want to store surplus land mines up people's chimneys.

 

And then it dawned on me.  The National Federation of Organ Bashers! That's the answer.  Way back in the 1980s Arthur Scargill gave them a pep talk, and ever since then every luxury liner and cruise-ship has been stuffed with church organists, all taking one or another of their six months' paid holidays a year and thoroughly enjoying themselves vamping out Gracie Fields' hits on those theatre organs that go up and down, and merrily proclaiming "Forsooth! This is indeed the life!"

It's a bit of a closed shop, but, and just between you and me, I think I've got my foot in the door.  Though you do have to be subtle, and I think I might have put my foot in the wrong door - the one labelled "it", actually.  I asked the Treasurer, you see, what the rate for the job for a union member was, and she replied - with quite unnecessary malice, I thought, while waving at me most aggressively a photocopy of the cheque for last quarter's parish share and the bill for the repair of the Sunday School ceiling after last Sunday's Messy Church paintball session for the under-5s - that it was a bit less than my choir pay was being docked for failure to turn up to sing on the back benches, and I therefore owed the church £25.50.

 

So I have every intention of continuing my training for the Golden Job - organ-bashing.  I have my eye on the cruises, and my feet on the pedals (actually, I'm sorry about that, if it woke you up during the sermon last week.  I though it was just a lumpy floor, but apparently those pedals are big notes that you play with your feet.  I didn't know that.  It seems you have to be a member of the Union before they tell you these things.)

 

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We will be recruiting for the choir at St Oswald's over the next few months, using every dirty trick in the book - blackmail arising from that little indiscretion of Auntie Aggie's in 1943 or the missing Gift Aid envelopes early in January - you name it, it's on file.  And potential recruits should not be put off by reports in the tabloid press (the Church Times, for instance) that the vibrations from singing can turn parts of your brain into rice pudding.  Some people are just jealous because they haven't been asked to write a Choirstalls column.

 

I'm just off to work up the job spec -  "incomparable rates of pay ... frequent opportunities to learn a real musical instrument with lots of pipes and pedals and things ... six days holiday a week ... no Latin, unlike some of our competitors ... free medals ... stylish protective clothing provided..."

 

They'll be absolutely flocking in.

 

Bunce, Gravy, Troughs and Snouts

I can remember a time when bunce were doughy things, crowned with royal icing, and with a load of currants inside.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, if you look at the Palace of Westminster, and pray scuse my French.

But good to see that some morality prevails - after all the Speaker (noble fellow) has called in the police.  Not to catch the crooks, mind, but to find whoever it was that leaked the dog food receipts to the Daily Telegraph.

A good friend of mine, a pensioner, now proposes to send all receipts for food and treatment for her dawg to the parliamentary fees office, c.c. her MP.  What a splendid idea.  I am so far from the polling station that I was thinking of buying a small flat to make the journey easier, and I shall certainly send the receipt in, for I, like members of our two chambers (and what an apposite word, chamber!), am a participant in the democratic process, and what is sauce for the goose...

The morality of the Palace of Westminster is the morality of the eleventh commandment - Don't Get Caught.  And it is what happens when little people occupy big seats.

Mary Jackson (don't look - she's rude)

Whiling away the hours of a Monday between 7pm and 9pm, as many soap widowers must do, I thought I'd trawl the web in case anybody had anything constructive and thoughtful to say about the hymnal Mission Praise, some of whose oleaginous effusions I was forced to endure yesterday.  I was hoping to find something along the lines of "Godawful crap - who writes this tripe - Vera Lynn?", or something equally c&t.  A hopeless endeavour, of course, since people who sit for hours in front of their computing engines probably think Mission Praise resembles in all respects the knees of the bee, but trawling more or less randomly often brings unexpected rewards, and so it was this evening, for I stumbled across the writings of one Mary Jackson and immediately lost interest in that dismal volume of pimply teenage Jee-zuz mush.

She is a "senior editor" of an online journal called the New English Review - an admirable title, you would think, until you learn that it emanates from Nashville, Tennessee, which I believe is in America.

Now unquirky is not an adjective you would first think of when attempting to describe this lustrous organ (from Nashville, Tennessee, I emphasize), but that would be very unfair to Mary Jackson, who is not only c&t but delightfully rude (in the sense of saucy) and a reely reely witty writer who had me bursting out in laughter seventeen times in as many minutes.

Her biog reads:

Mary Jackson lives in London. Her career to date has been somewhat varied. Having been told at a young age that fine words butter no parsnips, she determined to put this theory to the test. To this end she worked in a greengrocer's, speaking fine words to parsnips and truth to power. Other duties included adding apples to pears and insult to injury. Fired for correcting a misplaced apostrophe, she began helping out on a whelk stall in the East End, but was fired again for stealing bits of Cockney rhyming slang and selling them on the black market. Her current employment is unknown, but she aspires to work as a metaphor mixer in a large bakery, where she hopes to have her cake and eat her words.   Ms. Jackson blogs at The Iconoclast and her articles for New English Review are archived [at the New English Review website.]

Here she is on limericks,

and here on men and children

(from a different site.)

They were enough to whet my appetite, so if you will excuse me I will now spend another half-hour or three in her company.

Bye-ee.

Clarity in everything. Amen.

First it's Sir Jim Rose's report on the primary school curriculum pointing out that lotsa kids can't talk proper, innit, and now the Church Times carries a plea (1 May, p12) for better microphone techniques by the clergy in the interests of clarity and comprehensibility.

Quite.

But also in the same issue of Church Times is this, from a book review (by a high-up clergy person) :

"Heidegger's place in the philosophical canon as a critic of calculative rationalistic thinking and as the great rehabilitator of ontology is well established.  His work may be familiar to readers from the use made of it by existentialists."

- a book, moreover, published in a series which

"...seeks to avoid the nihilistic, reductionist alternatives of scientism and deconstruction through interdisciplinary theological interventions in familiar philosophical debates."

Er - yes. Quite.