Author: James Lark

It’s no wonder the York Railway Museum shifts so many poster prints…

I’m not a fan of inter-denominational church politics and as a rule am more than happy to take the pure and simple label “Christian” to describe my religious inclinations. But I have never felt closer to nailing my colours to the C of E mast than at the end of a week in which the Archbishop of Canterbury talked complete sense about the credit crisis whilst the Bishop of Rome took a subtle but nasty swipe at sexual minorities.

What he said has, predictably, been exaggerated and misreported; the Pope certainly never mentioned homosexuals and neither did he mention transsexuals; but given the Vatican’s recent attitude towards both (the Vatican has just announced its opposition to a United Nations proposal to protect gays from being criminalised and punished by governments for their orientation) it’s not difficult to see what the Pope meant when he said “the Church speaks of the human being as man and woman, and asks that this order is respected”.

I actually find it all the more sinister that his Holiness chose to disguise this as an environmental message (“rainforests deserve yes, our protection, but the human being as a creature which contains a message that is not in contradiction with his freedom, but is the condition of his freedom, does not deserve it less”) – he has taken an issue which concerns everyone and tried to wrap his own prejudiced views into it, which is no less than what Norman Tebbit did when he managed to turn a discussion about child obesity into a rant about sodomy.

Firstly, this shows a huge lack of perspective, a problem which is not unfamiliar to the church but which one hoped the Holy Father might not suffer from. Yet he suggests that as plants and animals are forced from their habitats and a million species face possible extinction over the next 50 years, God is equally ticked off when a man takes an expensive holiday to Australia and comes back as a woman. Whatever your beliefs about changing genders and the related issues of sexuality, is the latter really in the same league of awfulness? What the Pope said, in his sneaky Papal way, is that they’re just as bad as each other – and his obsession with “correct sex” (i.e. not bumming) shows just how preoccupied his leadership is with the minor issue (there, I’ve said it, it’s a minor issue) of sex and sexuality. Did his Christmas speech mention human rights abuses, perhaps name-check Mugabe or point out that people are still being tortured – sorry, interrogated – at Guantanamo bay? Nope. It’s just the trannies and, if you take his thoughts to their logical conclusion (most reporters have), queers who get the Papal wrath this year. Frohe Weihnachten.

What I wonder then, is this: has the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church forgotten the true meaning of Christmas?

It is, after all, a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who practiced and preached absolute acceptance of all human beings, who showed love to outcasts and sexual deviants and who did not have divisions of class, race or gender in his ministry. He never actually mentioned homosexuality (maybe he also thought it was a minor issue), but if there had been transsexuals in Judea at the time I can’t help feeling he’d probably have taken the time to chew the fat with them.

The inclusiveness of Jesus’ teaching is beautifully summed up by the apostle Paul, which is ironic because religious conservatives usually count on him being on their side. “There is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.”

It’s up to you, of course, but that’s the Christmas message I’m paying attention to this year.

Has anybody else noticed the deluge of panettone in England this Christmas? Every shop I go in seems to have top shelves bursting with panettone of different shapes and varieties, be they food shops, clothes shops or shops selling car parts. Indeed, I have gone past WHOLE shops devoted to the stuff – panettone up to the top of every shop window, balanced on top of every counter, being worn as hats by the staff.

I don’t remember this happening last year, and I’m sure than when I was young we managed to get through the whole Christmas season without the slightest hint of dry, tasteless Italian cakey stuff.

Which leads me to two possible conclusions:

1. It’s Bedford.
2. It’s the credit crisis.

The first would make sense as Bedford is full of mafioso, but doesn’t hold true as the panettone invasion has also affected parts of London and Cambridge I have visited in recent weeks.

So what about the second alternative? Dry and tasteless it may be, but panettone is at least cheap, unlike fruitcake topped with marzipan and icing. Is the stuff being marketed to thrifty Christmas shoppers, looking for something to eat after they’ve had their turkey twizzler main course?

Or has Gordon Brown entered into some kind of sinister deal with Silvio Berlusconi? Is Italy currently undergoing a similar deluge of mince pies or some other quintessentially English Christmas dessert (in which case they definitely got the better end of the deal)?

Or it is simply Italy’s way of dealing with the credit crisis? They’re hoping to solve their financial problems by selling the only thing they have left to ship out in their millions?

Let me be clear, this is not a complaint – the iPhone is the single most beautiful object I have ever had the pleasure to feel the sleek, streamlined weight of against my leg. Yes, I find it a bit erotic.

So maybe it’s no coincidence that when I sign a text message “xx” (as I am prone to doing to indicate anything from extreme fondness to lust to indifference), the predictive text messaging predicter automatically changes it to read “fx”.

A number of people have already leapt to the wrong conclusion.

…if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, surely at least that means the right time is still free for you to be at the right place?

A made-up person called Esh Acly just spammed me with an email headed “Night off pleasure”.

Yes, it’s possible that Esh Acly has made a rather basic albeit vital spelling mistake here. But I’m rather enjoying the idea that somebody thinks I’m getting so many nights of pleasure that I’ll be extremely tempted by the offer of one night’s respite.

…it is clear from the “before” and “after” images here that Scotch Beef is actually HUMAN FLESH!!!

So he had a great quality of life and from the looks of things modelled for the Edinburgh Woollen Mill – but that doesn’t make it right!

Paul McCartney wonders why the other Beatles wouldn’t let him release a tape of them dicking around.

That’s because it sounds shit, Paul. The other Beatles were right.

Mind you, it would probably hold its own against Standing Stone. Certainly it would be more bearable than Mull of Kintyre. But I doubt it would have the finesse of the frog song.

What is it about the new “pasta hut” advert that just makes me think of starving orphans…?

After the embarrassing farrago which was the BBC’s adaptation of Oliver Twist last year, it is a relief and a delight to see that the Beeb can still do Dickens properly. Though not quite as perfectly crafted as Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit, the BBC’s current offering is a masterclass in TV adaptation, and has the Dickensian balance between comedy and tragedy just right. Plus some really good performances, not just from reliable stalwarts like Tom Courtenay (who is mesmirising), but also from surprising areas – who knew Russell Tovey could act? That absurd Welsh one off Torchwood is really rather good! As is token ethnic Doctor Who girl Freema Catalogue!

But a gripe (and you knew I’d have one): what is it with TV serials having so little confidence in the actual content of the episode that they have to show you what’s going to happen in the next one to entice you back? The now-obligatory “coming soon” segment, which used to be more the kind of thing you got on Richard and Judy, now sits as a huge great spoiler at the end of every episode of everything.

Okay, I understand that series using the 45-minute single episode format can no longer rely on a juicy cliffhanger to woo viewers back for the next instalment, which is why the likes of Merlin and Doctor Who give you a taster as a matter of course. The downside to this is that they tend to show you the best bits to make the next week’s episode look much better than it really is, so every episode is invariably a big disappointment (invariably a great big mammoth disappointment in the case of Merlin).

But that’s not what I’m complaining about. I’m complaining about being shown the content of the next episode when you have been given a juicy cliffhanger, when you are sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens next. It’s a bit rubbish when a little teaser gives it all to you before you’ve had a chance to enjoy the anticipation.

When the revived Doctor Who first gave us a two-parter it fell right into this trap: Aliens of London gave us a suitably thrilling climax in which we saw the Doctor being killed – yes, killed! – then on rolled the caption “coming up” and we saw the Doctor running around chasing aliens in the next episode. So, oh, he wasn’t dead after all.

Since then the production team have got wise to that problem and started showing what’s coming up after the credits – and I believe in the last series they removed that bit altogether from some two-parters, which at least shows some confidence in the strength of their cliffhangers (even if, typically, the resolution was often a great big mammoth disappointment).

So why on earth can’t Little Dorrit do the same? It’s a grand adaptation which sets up huge Dickensian cliffhangers and there have been no disappointments so far – so I wish they’d stop telling me what’s coming up and let me watch the credits. As it is I feel the need to hastily switch off to avoid spoilers, which means that I don’t know what the theme music sounds like. These things bother me.

Coming up in the next blog entry: a rant about something and the word “mansuetude”!