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Bravo the British army for storming a Basra police station and rescuing two soldiers. That wasn’t highly irresponsible or anything.

Maybe they should have been handed over to coalition authorities – but then, that’s surely a decision that lies in the hands of the perfectly legal authorities in Iraq. The way the British army reacted, you’d almost imagine that they thought they were running the country.

As far as the Iraqi authorities were concerned, the two soldiers were being legally held for killing two Iraqi soldiers. No doubt the actual facts of the case needed to be questioned, but were their lives in imminent danger? From the legal authorities in Iraq who are, more or less, working with the coalition?

Whatever the facts, if two of our soldiers were being held by the authorities in a country we took seriously – say, America, or…well, America – whether or not their lives were in danger, it’s a fairly safe bet that the British army wouldn’t have gone bursting in to rescue them.

By sticking two fingers up and showing that they don’t take Iraq’s new government seriously after all, the British army have bolstered the position of the Iraqis who don’t take it seriously either.

Oh, well – we’ve pretty much gone and caused a civil war in Iraq as it is, might as well speed up the process.

Although Colonel Tim Collins has put the whole thing into perspective by describing the Basra unrest as like “a busy night in Belfast”.

Hmmm – tactful.

I have been attending to my duties as choir director this morning. Although the music in St Mark’s is largely traditional in nature, some of the trendier folk like me to occasionally use ‘modern songs’ and I am more than happy to oblige, as long as said modern songs have a half decent tune and words that mean something. I also prefer to use actually modern songs, not songs that were at the cutting edge of Christian music in the 1970s.

So it is that I have found myself trawling through a CD enticingly called New Songs. Or to give it its full title, New Songs CD Rom 6. It’s not as catchy as Wish You Were Here, but the songs have the twin virtues of being new and included in sheet music form – a perfect resource for worship leaders, as the CD cover proudly proclaims.

Half an hour of pressing the skip forward button on my CD player, and I have been subjected to twelve tracks of absolute bilge.

I’m an open minded guy; I’m not one of these people who are needlessly stuck in the past, I like new music and I welcome fresh ideas in church.

But I know a big load of turd when I’m subjected to it, and I refuse to polish it, even for the glory of God. (Well – unless expressly instructed to polish it by God. Frankly, I feel that God is with me on this one.)

There are several major objections to every single track on this CD:

1. They are all written like pop songs (second rate pop songs, I would add – none of it has the shelf life of a Total Eclipse of the Heart or a Sun Always Shines on TV). Quality aside, the problem with this style is that it’s very soloistic, written for a pop diva (second rate pop diva, at least) to sing with a free rhythm and even sometimes melody (at least, in some songs the audio track bears little resemblance to the music supplied). Churches full of people (many of whom, surprisingly, are not pop divas) just can not manage irregular rhythms (rhythms that change between verses, for crying out loud) – only the simplest syncopation is advisable, as I have learned to my own bitter cost. Can you imagine a whole congregation singing Total Eclipse of the Heart? Yes, that bad.

2. Equally, the words have a pop song quality, in that they’re mostly written for an individual, as an expression of an individual’s response to God. A line like “I remember it well, when I met you for the first time” may well be true for the writer, but not for a whole congregation (especially when many of them are of an age where they can barely remember what they had for breakfast…)

3. In any case, the words are, on the whole, bullshit. At best they’re a collection of unrelated and relentlessly repeated platitudes, sometimes jumbled up to create theologically dubious suggestions (er…when you say “Arise, you’re the everlasting light, flooding through my night” – just who are you talking to? Me? God? Are you sure it’s a good idea instructing God to arise?) At worst, they mean absolutely nothing at all (my favourite anatomically incorrect example is “As we bow our hearts in awe” – as we do what? What muscles have you been exercising???)

4. And it’s all dreadfully written. Sample this piece of obscenely dire poetry:

The beauty of your majesty
Yet remains unseen
But one day you’ll split the skies
And every eye will see.

(Reprinted without permission, but I reckon I’ll get away with it – for a start the author probably wouldn’t recognise it because it’s so similar to a million other worship songs; and in any case, they’re Christians so they’ll forgive me.)

It doesn’t even take a GCSE English student to note certain irregularities in the metre which I feel sure can’t have been intentional. And need I point out the heinous half-rhyme of “unseen” with “see”?

When you’ve finished analysing that one, amuse yourself by drawing a map of this Tolkeinesque landscape:

On the shores of our doubt
On the sands of our pain
We found a river of grace
And it flows with your hope
We come to the stream
Wash us in the river again

Be sure to clearly label the sands of pain and the shores of doubt; you’ll have to make your own decision about whether the river is distinct from the stream, I’m afraid. Personally I think the words describe very different sizes of running water, in which case who knows what the stream is flowing with.

That one I’m not so sure about, in fact. It’s probably silly nonsense, but maybe, just maybe, it’s a clever Christian parody of Finnegan’s Wake with a bit of Bunyan thrown in – in which case, I feel it could have been a little bit more OTT.

Finally,

5. They all sound the same.

So it’s back to Hymns Ancient and Modern on Sunday. (I also hate Hymns Ancient and Modern, for reasons which I won’t elaborate on here. Oh! for a New English Hymnal!)

Every so often, they come up with absolute gems, such as this list of uses for the new size G2. Fab.

During our improv fun yesterday, we were covering the topic of status and I mentioned that it’s always worth observing cats, which generally project a high status. (Not my idea, but something that the great Keith Johnstone suggests in Impro.)

So when I saw a cat across the road this morning I decided I would play high status to it. I met its gaze unflinchingly and stood in the manner of one who is better than a cat.

The cat sniffed and turned its head away from me. Before I knew it, by implying that I was not even worthy of consideration the cat had out-statused me in a flash. Ye gods, thought I, cats are even better at this game than Andrew Ormerod.

As I gathered my thoughts, I realised that the cat had now emerged from behind a nearby car and was once again staring at me. Caught off my guard, my status was lowered even further. As I stared back, my rival did the looking away trick again, adding an imperious gaze into the sky to cement its evident opinion of my worthlessness.

But then it made a fatal error: it looked back at me. Seeing that I was still staring at it, it quickly looked away again, and the contest was mine.

The cat slunk away, desperately trying to cling to its dignity, but losing all status by occasionally glancing back to see if I was still watching it. Which indeed I was.

Is it petty to feel so pleased with myself for having proved my worth against a neighbouring tabby?

I just got an email from English National Opera offering me a free Mozart ringtone.

I am enraged.

God forbid that we should forget to write something here about England winning the Ashes. After all, there may well be people who hadn’t even realised and, but for all the English blogs on the internet, would still be ignorant about it now.

I am being cautiously happy about the whole thing; certainly it feels like pay-back time for when I lost house cricket at school eleven years ago, though strictly speaking that was not against the Australians.

I just can’t help feeling that the Ashes are, and always have been, a bit of an insult. An urn containing the bails which were burnt in 1882 to signify “the death of English cricket” – well, hang on, I’m not sure we want those, do we? Why can’t we burn our own bails to represent the misplaced confidence of those surly Antipodeans? That’d put ’em in their place. It would also be a more lasting gesture for when the Aussies win the Ashes back next time round.

I think I’d feel happier if Ian Botham had been playing yesterday. Perhaps they think he’s a bit past it, I don’t know, but I remember him fondly from A Question of Sport and he was always very good at the brilliant “What happens next?” round. That surely would have put him in a good position to anticipate the moves of the Australians.

Just now I was nearly run down by a tall woman on a bike.

The way she almost glided into me was oddly graceful; she didn’t swerve, just swept past me as I dived out of the way, calm and straight as if she hadn’t seen me. She had a very long neck.

I imagine it was similar to how it would feel to be almost trampled by a giraffe.

The slightly oddly-named Life Begins At 30 blog (everyone knows that after 29 you are 21 again) has a great post about why you should eat locally produced food.

However it’s a disturbing post because of a couple of the comments further down. One person says:

Oh and another thing – I hate to be the one to tell you this, but life actually begins at 0. If you’re a Republican I guess you’d say life begins at -.75, but you wouldn’t say it to me because I’d karate chop you in the neck for voting for a retarded monkey twice in a row.

which is unnecessary, but at least the view of some people. Then someone replies:

jeez, some of you wacky liberals can’t even take a nice, simple post about the pleasures of fresh food without taking a pointless partisan swipe. Pathetic.

which is necessary, and I guess the view of some people. But liberals? I find it amazing, sometimes, that the word ‘liberal’ has become a mark of derision, of disrespect, in modern America. Perhaps I just don’t understand human nature very well. Perhaps I just don’t understand Americans very well.

Today it all got decidedly surreal.

Halfway through the episode a sweaty out-of-breath Harold burst in to tell everyone that big yellow bulldozers had arrived to knock down their houses. And so they had.

In tomorrow’s episode I understand that the residents of Ramsey Street are prevented from making any formal complaints when the earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

It was such a lovely idea to end Neighbours today with Paul falling off a cliff.

Unfortunately it was abysmally filmed. What we got was: Paul running into shot from a low angle, followed by him faltering then a different shot of a sheer drop. Then we got a close-up of Paul’s face with the word ‘whoops…’ dubbed onto the soundtrack, and another shot of the sheer drop with a fast zoom in to suggest falling.

This kind of effect I produced equally well myself as a 15-year-old with a camcorder.

How is it that Neighbours does brilliant explosions and car crashes, but can’t even show a man falling off a cliff?