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If my current housing situation has ever been summed up in a single photo, it is here:

Knowing that we were moving to a house just down the road from a swimming pool, Alastair and myself decided when we were still touring Australia that it would be a fantastic idea if we started a fitness regime of regular visits to the pool, in order to make us healthier, fitter, better-looking people. Nobody believed we’d ever really do it of course – but then, nobody thought we’d really have a projector and watch films on the big screen in our living room, and we’ve proved them wrong on that count as well.

So yes, I’ve been swimming a lot. In fact, since starting I’ve maintained a very healthy five visits a week. When I first went I was appalled to discover how unfit I was, with a couple of lengths finding me grasping for the side of the pool and spluttering for breath, fighting the growing nausea and pain shooting through all of my muscles.

I’ve kind of got over that phase. On Thursday I felt a particular breakthrough when I realised that I was still ready for another twenty lengths after my usual routine. (Alastair’s routine, incidentally, seems to have settled into a routine of drinking until two in the morning, getting up four hours later to prepare for supervisions and possibly fitting in a quick guilt-inspired trip to the swimming pool and observing that he’s not enjoying it any more.)

I put my progress down partly to the yellow T-shirted attendants who stand around the pool watching the activity with a sardonic air, and who I can feel staring at me every time I stop for a breather, as if they’re thinking “why’ve you stopped? Is it to perve at all the glistening naked bodies?” They are not aware that my eyesight makes it impossible to perve at anyone, so I have to maintain continuous swimming to persuade them that I’m just a decent member of society trying to get fit.

Today saw another exciting development. Because, being a saturday, the flumes were open. I haven’t been on a flume for over ten years and I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to have a go today, awkward though it felt when everybody else taking advantage of the flume fun was half my age or younger. Still, I ascended the stairs (under the scornful gaze of every serious swimmer in the pool, plus the disapproving looks of the yellow T-shirts), feeling a growing goose-pimply excitement – though that might have been partly to do with being wet and cold.

At the top I was politely told that I needed “an inflatable” to use the flume, which would be found back at the bottom. So I had to go through the embarrassing descent (under the same disapproving inspection, real or imagined) and nearly gave up on the idea altogether. But I found myself a doughnut-shaped inflatable blue thing and ascended again (presumably by now the serious swimmers were having a good laugh at my expense and the yellow T-shirts were on the phone to the police).

All the safety notices explicitly said I had to go down feet first, so that is how I finally set off on my blue doughnut. My journey at first was rather pedestrian – but then remembered how it works and started using the corners to accelerate, swinging my blue doughnut up them like a bobsleigh.

Unfortunately, I had failed to anticipate the affect this would have on a doughnut-shaped inflatable, and as I rounded the second corner with increasing speed I spun round and found that I was hurtling down the flume backwards, just like it said not to in the safety notices. I tried correcting my position with my feet but I was going too fast by that stage and with every corner I spun further out of control. This, by the way, is why bobsleighs are not circular.

I finally corrected my position on the final bend, thus avoiding possible death and a certain telling off from one of the yellow T-shirts.

I went back to swimming lengths.

By the way, the answer to the question which is no doubt on the lips of the ladies (and some of the men) reading this is: yes, I now have a swimmer’s physique, with muscles rippling through my taut, firm body. Thank you for taking an interest.

This is quite clever – spam that says “hi, you’ve got some new content on MySpace”. What a neat way of tricking vulnerable idiots (ie: children) into click-click-clicking on random links, and down-down-downloading random viruses.

Except that anyone under sixteen thinks email sucks and wouldn’t read it in the first place. So maybe not that clever.

Russell T Davies has only gone and brought back K9 and Company…

The house I have just moved into is situated directly opposite Cambridge’s Unitarian Church. I knew nothing at all about the Unitarians but was curious to discover that these ones appear to spend most of their time having salsa evenings. It is clear from without (and I haven’t dared look upon the within) that they have some disco lights and a glitter ball, and they were kind enough to post an invitation through our door asking us to join the salsa fun.

Not that there’s anything strange about salsa per se. Indeed, Latin American dancing has for many centuries played a vital role in church history. And I like a glitter ball as much as any man. (Probably more, to be honest.)

No, the curious thing is that the Unitarians appear to do very little else. You’d imagine that a church might house some kind of regular worship, but no – it’s salsa all the way.

Things began to get even more curious when a church historian friend of one of my housemates explained that the Unitarians don’t believe in the divinity of Christ, or in the Trinity, or even necessarily in God.

So it appeared that what we have here is not so much a church as a full blown cult, based on a multiple heresy. Suddenly, they seemed like a much more interesting group to have living opposite us, and I was quite keen to discover more about their dark activities.

Though not quite keen enough to go to the salsa evening.

Fortunately, the website for the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches has all the answers. Note that they use the word “Christian” – on the surface, it looks like perhaps rumours of their heresy have been greatly exaggerated.

And yet when they come to tackle this question themselves, they ask: Christian or More Than Christian?

More Than Christian, eh? Now that sounds more like the kind of cultish claim that I was hoping for.

“Among Unitarians,” they explain, “there are those who find the focus of their faith elsewhere than in liberal Christianity, for example in religious humanism or Creation Spirituality.”

Ah…so that would be…Less Than Christian, surely? Religious humanism or Creation Spirituality being, essentially…not Christian.

Their perspectives on Jesus and the Bible shed further light on them. It seems that generally speaking, they think of Jesus “as a major figure” but “as divine only in the sense that his life and work revealed – or came to symbolise – the divinity and high potential inherent in everyone.”

Again…not Christian. I mean – lovely, of course, to meet regularly and recognise that Jesus was a nice man. But I could do the same thing in recognition of Sue Perkins – who is very nice – and I hardly think it would qualify it as a religion.

And as far as the Bible goes, “Bible extracts may be incorporated in Unitarian worship, as may readings from any sacred or secular literature or poetry which is felt to be appropriate and relevant.”

So – that’s just about anything again, isn’t it? It’d be like reading Edward Lear at my Sue Perkins meetings.

So – here’s the big question – what do they believe? The website has answers here as well, in a section titled “Unitarian Theology” – though theology seems a slightly generous word to use when “hotchpotch philosophy” would suffice. In short, the page explains that “God” could be anything of importance in your life, a symbol, a mystery, or – if you prefer – altogether meaningless.

So essentially Unitarians can believe…well, anything they like. Or indeed nothing.

In other words, they are the same as anybody else.

It therefore seems a little unfair on real heresies to dignify the Unitarians with the same name, suggestive of something radical and daring, when they don’t really believe in anything.

Except, it seems, salsa.

So not so much a cult, then, as a social club.

And I suppose it’s inevitable that when a group of people who have no system of beliefs to unify them decide to meet regularly, they’re going to have to find something else that draws them together. I’d imagine the salsa just emerged as the one thing that they were all really interested in – though perhaps that was many decades ago, and now it’s just an inbred tradition which most of them go through the motions of without any real passion at all.

It’s all a bit disappointing. But if I want a freakish cult nearby, I suppose I could always check out Eden Chapel, which if nothing else is home to various central CICCU* meetings.

*Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union; like the Spanish Inquisition, but without the nice red costumes.

If you haven’t already seen the much-hyped most recent episode of Extras, then you should probably download it here while you still can.

Not because it’s particularly good – except for a scene involving a homeless person it’s pretty insipid stuff – but because there is an unbelievably weird scene in which David Bowie suddenly turns to a piano and makes up an insulting song about Gervais (or at least his character – like there’s a huge difference…). Which I’d say is as big a comedy coup as we’re likely to see for a good many years.

So this morning I got some spam which started with a quote from Paul Carr. And my first thought was: wow, spammers have got really specific in the random passages they use to get past spam filters. How clever of them to choose to spam me with words from my publisher.

Then I remembered that Paul is pretty good at doing this himself, and is usually more amusing. So we don’t need spammers after all.

From the A Word A Day mailing list:

The word buccaneer reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago back in
Scotland. On Guy Fawkes night (British equivalent of Halloween) a little
boy was visiting his neighbors dressed as a pirate Captain, complete with
tricorn hat and eyepatch. He knocked at the door of a little old lady who
lived down the road. “Oh my goodness!” said the LOL, “You’re a Pirate!”
Then she asked, “But where are your buccaneers?” The little boy looked her
in the eye, shrugged, and replied, “Under my buccan hat!”

Erm … Guy Fawkes night is the British equivalent of Hallowe’en? Surely Hallowe’en is the British equivalent of Hallowe’en? Come to think of it, wasn’t it a Celtic festival for thousands of years before it arrived in the US?

My favourite bit from that article, by the way:

In England it is said that elves rode on the backs of the villagers’ cats. The cats had fun but the villagers did not and would lock their cats up so that the elves could not catch them.

Awesome. Cats always have fun.

I just tried to post a comment on this entry in Graham Pond’s blog, and I got the following message:

Comment Submission Error
Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

You are not allowed to post comments.

This would seem to me to be a rather strange response from a comments submission form, so I’m wondering if Pond might have actually barred me from making comments on his blog. Perhaps he finds my gentle, off-the-wall humour tiresome. Or perhaps he feels threatened, and is worried that my ascerbic wit would steal his thunder.

Either way, he’s missing out. It was a great comment.

One of the things I have learned about myself through going to Australia is that the irrational fear of flying I have gradually developed over the last few years has become a genuine, terrifying and very serious, if still irrational, fear of flying.

The root of my fear is this: I spend the whole flight thinking that I’m going to die.

The first time I flew, I gawped out of the window at the tiny buildings on the ground, overcome by the brilliance of the experience and the miracle of flight. But the experience seems to have been clouded for me by the sheer stupidity of hurtling at speeds we were never meant to reach at a height we were never meant to reach in a big, heavy lump of metal which would nevertheless crumple like paper if it were to hit the ground in the wrong way.

Superman smugly tells us that flying is “still statistically the safest way to travel”. Bullshit. So statistically a higher percentage of people die travelling on foot from their bedroom to their living room, do they?

People who I toured Australia with thought that my fear of flying was a bit of a joke, a way to make take-off a little more exciting with a few effeminate shrieks.

If they could see into my head, they would see that there’s nothing funny about it. I spend most of the duration of any flight thinking about death, contemplating how painful it’s likely to be and the variety of ways it could happen, and praying very very hard indeed. If I prayed that hard in church I’d be a Saint already. If I manage to get engrossed enough in an in-flight movie to forget my location for a few minutes, the slightest bit of turbulence has me hyperventilating and working out exactly who I would contact first if I had time to turn on my mobile phone before the plane hit the ground/sea/building. (Interestingly, it is somebody who I don’t contact very often under normal circumstances.)

It’s absolutely torturous – I just spent about twenty hours on planes to get back to England and I reckon I spent about eighteen and a half hours of the journey thinking about dying. That’s why I didn’t sleep at all. And it’s not like I even died, it turns out.