Friday, 9 August 2013
WTF?
Just in case - and it seems unlikely on recent form - you've come here looking for something in the way of serious thought, or a bit of lit crit, perhaps a poem - I can only apologise and suggest you look elsewhere. I'm afraid this warm August has thoroughly addled my pate, I seem to be permanently tired - and everywhere I look it's the Silly Season. I managed not to post yesterday on the Jimmy Savile float outrage (it's given me an idea for next year's Carshalton Carnival), but today I found myself reading the story of a lady vicar's offensive bumper sticker. This sticker (which, we are assured, went unremarked by Rowan Williams himself) bears the legend WTFWJD, i.e. WTF would Jesus do? A variant on the better-known WWJD - What would Jesus do? (a good, if often unanswerable question), the WTF version is generally employed by 'anti-fundies [fundamentalists]' and indeed anti-Xtians, as a weapon of mockery (there's even a song of the same name), so I'm not sure if the lady vicar really knows what she's doing, other than being, well... silly. But then I read on - and was astonished to learn that this lady vicar is none other than the well-known librettist Alice Goodman, who is the wife of our Greatest Living Poet, Geoffrey Hill! What on earth are we to make of this? Of all the names one might expect to turn up in a Silly Season story, that of Geoffrey Hill is surely the very last.
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"Christianity has a long tradition of open debate where people can bring their differing views and share their perspectives."
ReplyDeleteFortunately, interspersed with occasional inquisitions, stocks, stakes and gibbets. Just to keep everyone on their toes.
Never you mind, Nige, the world may throw all manner of bewildering and disturbing changes at us in the autumn of our lives, but butterflies are forever. Yet isn't it a telling comment on the state of the C of E that she looks to the imprimatur of Rowan Williams for an offensive vulgarity any half-competent parent would discipline in a flash? Ah well, I suppose we should be grateful she didn't say that we can hardly expect her to worry about decency in a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
Driving through Lauder on the way to Edinburgh yesterday we noticed a contingent of plod (well, three actually) doing a house to house (Scottish:hoose to hoose) as the town has permanent roadworks we had time to observe the full force of the law at work. What, I dryly asked frau m, do you think they are looking for? Probably looking for Mark, she proffered. Mark is our plumber and lives in Lauder, he also maintains the copshop boiler. As autumn is almost upon us and that is normally the time for our boiler to once again complain about it's joints we will no doubt have chapter and verse on the devilish doings.
ReplyDelete"As the town now has a new commuter ghetto (aka estate) there is little doubt that the Edinburgh ex townies were behind the Saville incident." Will be the headlines in next weeks Southern Reporter.