In Defence of Shakespeare

It may seem a wee hubristic for me to assume that Shakespeare needs defending, given that he's outsold me by about a gazillion to one, but following a few conversations recently, I feel I need to grab a Stetson, pull on my boots, and get on my high horse.

I  was talking to a relative this weekend, and as invariably happens when you're a teacher, everyone who ever went to school* has  an opinion with what's wrong with education, and how it can be fixed. ***

The relative's current bugbear was Shakespeare. For those not aware, it is legally compulsory to teach Shakespeare in English secondary  schools.  This was the initial complaint, and it is one I can somewhat sympathise with. If Shakespeare's works are so good, why do they have to be compulsory? The sad answer, however,  is because Shakespeare is also difficult, and if it didn't have to be there, it'd be wiped off many a school curriculum faster than the smile of Phil Jones's face at the end of the 2011/2012 season.

This semi-reasonable point was swiftly followed by the unforgivably irrelevant.

'They don't even think Shakespeare wrote his plays, so why is everyone so Wow! about it?'

Apart from the issues of Who The Fuck Are 'They'? and Who The Fuck Is 'Everyone', this is a statement which bores to the core of the fabric of my being.  I shit you not.

There are bonds of family and kinship that provoke an inherent abhorrence against reckless, unbridled violence towards the members of your nearest and dearest. I was tempted to put them aside.

My main problem with this witless vacuity is that it seems pretty clear to me that it was rampant class prejudice which  lead to this cock-arsed idea that Shakespeare couldn't have written his plays, because he wasn't spat out of one of England's public schools, wasn't a member of the nobility. He wasn't, in short, the inbred offspring of two fat-necked chinless land-owning cousins from the shires, but was, instead,  the son of a glove-maker from the Midlands.

The other important things about this is that it is matters even less than William Hague's empty whinges in the  vague direction of Putin's embryonic invasion of Ukraine, while simultaneously the British government aren't prepared to sacrifice all that lovely Russian loot by imposing any kind of sanction.  It doesn't matter who wrote the plays and poems. When we talk about 'Shakespeare' we're talking about a body of work,  not a body of man.  Shakespeare is important in the words that exist, not in The Life and Times of a Glove-Making Yokel****.

And Shakespeare, the body of work, is brilliant. I fell in love with Macbeth (the play) at school, when I fell in love with Lady Macbeth  (the character, worryingly).  Like most snotty reactionaries I then drove my cultural tanks onto the lawns of The Bard, and started firing rounds of accusation. Mostly that Shakespeare  was a fuck-arse verbose wanker. I was always charmingly eloquent.

But I refound my love, and now try to pass it on, and to kindle at least a slice of that  love in my young charges, my Shakespeare padawans.

I gave a slightly less antagonistic version of the above in response to the unnamed relative.  The next ball in this game of Ignorance Tennis was a cracker:

'I bet if Shakespeare came back he'd be like 'That's not what I meant' to all these university professors who write about him.'

This is, to me, the equivalent of wearing a t-shirt which says  'I am a fucking moron, stab me'. No-one ever says to kids doing doughnuts in a Ford Escort round Aldi carparks, 'That's not what Henry Ford had in mind.'

In fact, if Shakespeare came back from that undiscover'd country from which no traveller doth return, and started bitching about how his writings were being misinterpreted, I'd tell him to sling his hook, encounter the darkness as a bride, and fuck off back to Deadland.  I'm no more interested in what he's got to say about his writing than wondering whether Yaya's Toure's equaliser in the Capital One Cup was deliberate or not. It was a thing of beauty. That is enough.

Shakespeare is divisive. But Shakespeare is complex. For every over-wrought, long-winded phrase, there's a finely-balanced, killer phrase which can encapsulate  tomes of philosophical weight in a few words. There are the famous ones: To be or not to be - the futility of existence, and the paradox of life, in six words. The beautiful ones: A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet - the arbitrary relationship between language and existence.

 And, of course, the lesser known gems: It's a game of two halves, and it's not over till Nasri says it's over.

Well done City, cheers Shakey.  

* Everyone **

** Of course, there are people who don't have the luck of access to education. I don't meet these people, unfortunately.

*** I hate to break this to you, but most of you are wrong. No offence, that's just the way it is. Live with it.

****Actually, his old man seems to be have been a pretty well-off small business older. Shakespeare is no more a yokel than Lily Allen, Damon All-Bran and Jamie Oliver are cockneys. 

Gerrorrff Moi Lahnd.

I've been for a pleasant afternoon amble in the Surrey countryside today, partly to clear out the Christmas Cobwebs, partly because tomorrow is Return to Work Monday - the double misery of a Monday and the end to the holidays. Factor in the the fact that it is January - the waking hangover of the calendar year - and you have a Holy Trinity of abject Misery.

Luckily, it was a head-clearer of a day.  No pesky distractions such as sunshine or dry, unsodden paths were to to be found anywhere. In fact, the majority of the paths seemed, like the earth itself, to have started commemorating the centenary of the First World War by emulating the conditions of the trenches of Flanders Field. Or maybe it was nature's protest about Michael Gove's jingoistic rewriting of the catalysts and conditions of that same war. Even the ground weeps when he speaks.

Regardless, there were paths, and they afforded a pleasant afternoon under grey, open skies, along the skeletal fingers of winterdead trees. Surrey is an opinion-splitter for me, as a place to walk. It is very pretty, and generally a gentle amble rather than a Let's-All-Go-To-Mount-Doom epic mountain trek.  Quaint, rather than rugged. A nice place for a nice, easy, Sunday stroll. 

The maggot in the ointment amongst this twee world of stone cottages and red telephone boxes is the level of  ostentation and suspicion inherent in the local folk.  The county reeks of money and isolationism. Whether in the array of superbly expensive vehicles in the drives of cottages which once would have been peopled by rural workers, but are now peopled by balding, middle-aged City workers, aiming to live a little slice of Ambridge. Whether in the looks of You're-Not-From-Round-Here in the dead eyes of every waxed-jacket, tweed-cap wearing would-be Lord of the Manor you pass. Whether in the huge barn conversions whacked in the middle of fields, where the established rights-of-way are often blocked , sometimes hidden, sometimes invisible.

These sweeping strokes of my digital pen are obviously not true of all. There are many paths which are well-maintained, many styles which function. But often you are made to feel as if you are trespassing, and that the gentrified version of Farmer Palmer will be lurking with intent behind every shadowy yew.

When I was younger I often heard the phrase 'Property is Theft'. It stuck me as slightly odd, because I definitely had not stolen any of my Star Wars figures or Action Men, and I clearly remember my mum actually paying for my bike. As I grew, I began to see that there was truth in this. 

Noone actually has a right to ownership of any land. We're all born on the planet, and it was here long before we were, and will be long after we've wiped ourselves out by not looking after it properly. Over the millennia groups of people staked a claim to areas of land, because that's where they and their ancestors lived,  and they were harder than you, so fuck off. Or, groups of people nicked land, because they were harder than you, and had bigger spears, or brighter flags. Most property has been thieved. At best, we can call ourselves custodians. In most cases, we're really borrowers. But in many cases, it is outright stealing. And stealing is wrong, as the Catholic Church of my childhood told me daily, from atop a chryselephatine altar.

But my bugbear today isn't those group land-grabs. That's a much wider field than I'm prepared to cross*. It's when individuals hog land. 

In Britain, we have a hard-fought-and-won right to use established rights of way. Paths, ancient and modern, which have been used regularly,can be deemed an established route open to all.  It is, for many, the only way that they are able to explore the wet, dank beauty of the British countryside.

And now, enter stage right (of course), Owen Paterson, an environment secretary so hostile to the environment that he is less suited to his role than Fred West's Babysitting Service or Jesus Christ's School of Revenge.

Mr Paterson wants land-thieves (or landowners, if you prefer), to be able to ignore these rights-of-way. That's Owen Paterson, who lives in a massive house, on a massive hill, in a massive field, surrounded by a massive wall, in the Shropshire Countryside. I'm not saying there's a conflict of interest, in the same way I wouldn't say David Cameron isn't trustworthy. It'd be like pointing up and shouting, 'Look - the sky!'.

Supporting climate-change-denying, badger-baiting, fracking-supporting Mr Paterson is popular television gobshite and all-round turdblood, Jeremy Clarckson. A man whom I would tire of slapping, but it would be a physical tiring rather than an emotional one. I reckon I could go at him for a good fifteen and half hours before my arms would ache too much though. Then I'd run him over with a pink Fiat Punto, bundle him the boot of a pink Fiat Uno, and drive it into the sea, condemning him to a perpetual burial in a car he would no doubt claim is driven by someone black, lesbian, midget, Guardian-reading, and all those other eighties-right-wing-cliches-about-left-wingers. 

His support for this would be enough, in itself, to for me take up an opposing view, as the odds on such a view making sense would be phenomenally high. I have yet to hear him utter anything that doesn't make me dream of slow-murder.  Coupled with Paterson's support, I'm waving the flag before even reading the minutiae of the proposal. After reading the minutiae, I'm loading the metaphorical cannons.

This government is on an ideological crusade. And crusade is an apt word, because it is to the time of The Crusades that they wish to return. Paterson wants to play the feudal overlord, and if there's one thing feudal overlords hate, it's groups of oiks tramping over their land, arguing about which path to take. 

Remember, if it weren't for the dedication of walkers past, Sauron would have won. Don't let these dark lords get away with it. 

Walk, hassle MPs, don't buy anything endorsed by Clarkson. Get out into the country. Remind the 1% that the 99% are here, and won't go down with out a fight. Or a firm stroll, at least.

*Boom Boom

The Spirit of Christmas

It is ten forty-five p.m, 24 December 2013. In the Chemist household, this points in one direction. Not, as the end of the previous sentence suggests, to an evening of shite, shallow pop, but to the yearly family visit eglise-wards.  We’re off to church.

It has been a family tradition, since before I became aware, that we drag ourselves away from the world of secular pleasures and go and pay our dues to the Baby J, the donkeys and all the pretty little blonde angels.  

I’m from a Catholic household, and was an unblinking believer for the first sixteen years of my life. This meant that Christmas meant something of actual importance. It was a reminder and celebration of the wond’rous joy of the dawning of a new world. Unlike Easter, which, while being the bigger miracle, was an unending guilt trip of biblical proportions.  Easter is shit.

Even though I had God removed from my life by sustained thought, and, ironically, an epiphany, the remnants of this period are deeply ingrained into the deepest trenches of my psyche.  Christmas is more than an excuse to get wasted without being judged, to stay in bed until early evening, to have port and stilton for breakfast. These are, indeed, parts of the wonder of the Yuletide period, but the whole is greater than the parts.

I first got into the family Midnight Mass at the age of eight, when I discovered that I would be allowed to open my presents on return from the slowest hour-and-a-half of my life, rather than having to wait until the morning.  When you’re waiting for a lightsaber and laser-rifle, those hours matter.  It’s the difference between a life of freedom or a life of alien-overlorded servitude.

And, as I imagine most children find, it was chore.  A big, fat steaming Christmas chore, to which I was bonded. As the years passed, the ways to pass time changed. For a few years, I’d translate the Latin verses into English for the duration.  Hitting my early twenties, I’d spend the dripping minutes of boredom checking out the talent from a fog of festive spirits. A phase which lasted pretty much the rest of the decade, with various degrees of disorientation, and talent.

I never pulled at church. I clearly wasn't working the room well enough.

I must’ve seemed somewhat responsible in my late twenties, because the Priest’s little helper, lighting his way with a red nose to put Sid James to shame, and with a face of thread-veins like a map of the Nile, asked me to take charge of the collection plate.  Feeling grown-up, I agreed. Feeling shitfaced, I dropped it. I have not been asked again.

Two years ago, Mario Balotelli was at the same church as me. I asked him to make sure we won our game on Boxing Day. We lost. Mario, you owe me a Christmas present.

The last few years I've been on driving duty, so Christmas Eve’s excuse for getting ripped off my tits has gone the way of the dodo. Or Dodi, for those with a royalist streak.

Now, I sit still, sing, and think about the beauty of the occasion, and consider the communal  coming together in midwinter which has been a feature of European life for millennia. In the calm sobriety, in my concrete belief in no unearthly being* , I remember that we are all here, now, at this point in time and space. That we have all sprung from one chance mutation somewhere in Africa eons ago. I remember that many have come before, and many will come after. Hundreds of thousands of years have seen billions of lives, loves, losses.  We have shared stories, we have risen and fallen, grown and shrivelled.

And I remember that, today, globally, more than ever, we share histories, cultures, ye traditional hopes and fears.

And for that, even if the rest of the year you’re an absolute fucking nonce, remember - we all are human. We share that. We are none of us islands. At best, be loving, caring, considerate. At worst, don’t be a dickhead.  It’ll be the 27^th soon, the peace and goodwill will all be over, and people will expect to get shafted. For the next two days, no one wants to be fucked over.

Make Christmas mean something. Make it mean people.

Happy Christmas to you all.**

* Not including Roger from American Dad

** Apart, of course, from David Cameron, Gideon Osbourne, Michael Gove and all the other devils of spiteful hate. Even I don’t feel that festive. 

Giant Douche or Shit Sandwich?

Russell Brand has been making headlines recently for things other than bullying Spanish waiters and marrying plastic popstars. The would-be pirate took up his mantle of the people's poet from its previous holder, Rick from The Young Ones. On Newsnight he informed Paxman why he'd never voted, and why apathy is the only sensible choice - because politics is a two-horse race, and the two horses are being ridden by very similar jockeys who shout at each other whilst riding for the same stables. Or something along those lines.

I've never liked Brand. Not for any good reason, but because I think he'd make a shit pirate, and he made a shit Arthur.  The cinematic equivalent of pissing on a sleeping Dudley Moore's face.  An unforgivable crime against art, humanity, the environment and alcoholics.

But he struck a raw nerve with this pontification. Paxman gave him a mild grilling, like the shit final flames of a  4a.m. kebab shop heater on the last flaccid slices of purple donner, only to come out in semi-support a few days later.  Many people have liked the clip on Facebook, some have declared him a political genius, and I've even found myself agreeing with him, as his latest crusade to be a pantomime Jesus coincided with my own falling out with my party.

It will come as little surprise that I am, and always have, been a Labour voter.  They're noticeably a little more centre than myself, but even in a two horse race you need to bet on something if you want to get anything out of it. However, the appointment of Tristam Hunt to Shadow Education, and Rachel Reeves to Work and Pensions was a Bridge over the River Kwai too Far, or somesuch.  One Step Beyond. The straw that ...you get the picture. I don't like them. 

Hunt is a TV historian whose education credentials are the same as everyone else's - he once went to school.  His first pronouncement was to offer support for Free Schools while insisting he didn't support Free Schools.

Reeves' moment of glory was facing up to Ian Duncan Smith, flexing her right-of-centre muscles, while laughing at his attempts to dismantle the Social Security system, and promising that when she got into power she'd fuck up anyone who even thought the words ' Jobseeker's Allowance' .  If he thought he was hard, she'd come over there, shove his namby-pamby policies up his lily-white arse, and then go and personally kill anyone with a hint of disability. With her bare hands, while whistling the Dead Kennedy's ' Kill the Poor'.

At least, that's how I remember it.

I resigned my membership shortly after this, and decided I couldn't vote for a party which had these two fucksticks on their front bench. If it was my party, I'd take them to a forest, break their ankles and leave them for bears.

This resolve has lasted about three weeks. Disgusted as I am with these two wanktards, the opposite is unbearable.  In the last week alone Cameron has let his fat mates know that austerity is here to stay.  Dressed in white tie, at a five-course meal with the Lord Mayor of London,  sat atop a throne of gold carried on the back of a tortoise made of fifty-pound notes*, he set out his plans to keep the rest of the country on the bones of its arse.

At the same time, Gove has written to the teaching unions, stating that he is prepared to enter talks. Talks about how his plans are going to go ahead without any negotiation, and that the talks must include not only the two unions which represent 95% of teachers, but some other pissy little associations for teachers who are too well-paid, or too right wing, to be part of a union, but daren't leave themselves vulnerable to being fucked over in one of the myriad ways a teacher can be fucked over.

There are six of these cop-out groups, representing under 5% of teaching staff. They can have their own meeting with Gove. They don't strike, they don't stand for anything . They just enjoy the benefits the other two unions have won for them over the last century. Parasites.

Meanwhile, Ian Duncan Smith continues his crusades to eradicate poverty by eradicating the poor. Fringe Tories propose killing disabled children to save money**.  Nick Clegg continues to live.

So, even though the two options are similar, they're not the same. In the middle, it may be a bit Animal Farm - you look at one, you look at the other, and you can't tell the difference. But move away from the centre fence, and the differences show.

So I'm voting. Because the people who are likely to have enough of a conscience to abstain on principle are also the people who would be more likely to vote Labour. The natural principles of a Tory don't stretch that far. And the thought of another four years of this gaggle of amateur-night ideologues is too much to consider.

We're never going to revolt, it's not in our cultural  DNA. We'll grumble, abstain, maybe even actually go to the polls to write 'none of these dickheads'. But we won't be out in the streets, shaking pitchforks, stringing the Bullingdon Boys up from a Downing Street lamppost.  So until the day comes that the people of Britain have their own Odessa Steps moments, I'm going to use the only weapon I can use legally.

I'm voting Labour.

Hopefully Reeves and Hunt will choked on their stupidity by then . If you haven't got hope, you haven't got anything.

* I made that bit up. But for a second, you believed it, didn't you.  Because you can see him doing it, can't you.

** I didn't make that up, shockingly. 

Sunday Evening, the Halloween of the Week.

I had a good holiday this summer.  It ticked many boxes: it was long, there was tasty food, and it was almost as geographically as far away from my place of work as it is possible to get, at least for the first three weeks.

I needed this break, not so much because I was in the midst  of an end-of-school-year burn out as because I was in the midst of a very-real-danger-of-punching-someone-I work-with crisis. It would not have been a good move, professionally. Personally, I can't really judge. Violence is never the answer, but sometimes you don't want answers,  you just want to smash things up.

I've been back home for over a week, and the greater part of the bile has subsided. And I've been back at work for a week, with very little incidence of any all-consuming rage. The break done me good, and no doubt about that.

But tonight, I'm feeling resentful. Not for any specific reason, but because I had become used to waking up, musing the world over for a couple of minutes, and going back to sleep. I'd become used to my biggest decision being what's for lunch, what's for dinner, and occasionally, what's for second dinner.  In essence, I'd become very much used to doing what the fuck I want, when I want.  

Fortunately, I usually quite enjoy my job, and it is something I want to do.  Tonight, it's not actually work that's irritating my psyche with the itching powder of life. It's what work means for my Sundays.

I recall fondly the days when Sunday was still a day of the weekend, when Sunday was another pub day. Admittedly, a slightly quieter, more pipe-and-slippers pub day than a let's-blow-up-the-world pub day, but a day for setting up shop in a boozy establishment, and wringing the last few hours of life out of the dying embers  of the weekend's fire.  Things would happen on Sundays.  Quiet things, slow studied, slightly unsteady things, but things nonetheless.

But being a teacher, that's not an option I have. Monday's are never a slow slide into the working week, but an early morning slap in the face with a spiked glove of awakening. Monday requires alertness, preparation, pep and zest. It does not forgive the groggy hangover, nor make allowances for the fuzzy head. Monday fucks you up.

Sunday evenings are now a bit of a graveyard of a time.  It often feels like the gateway between this world and the next has thinned,  and not just because of the living dead who often inhabit it - Last of the Summer Wine, Downton Abbey , Antiques Roadshow and their ilk. I'd bet, statistically, more aged folk slip their mortal chains on a Sunday night, home, alone, weighed down by the decades of Sunday night wistful misery. All just to avoid seeing in another Monday.  I'd imagine Sunday night is suicide night, for those with suicidal tendencies.  Conversely, I can't image it being music night, for those with Suicidal Tendencies.

It is a morose evening. I've accepted this, and developed a range of strategies to impede its grey grip on life. Hot Chocolate with a nip of whisky. Long baths, Radio 3 and a good book. Shooting people in the head for gleeful pleasure on Call of Duty. They pass the time, they keep the ghosts at bay.

But the ghosts of the holiday are powerful, and there remains  a yearning for a couple of Sunday night pints,  maybe a cheeky whisky or three, and a handful of fags. The summer is dying, and it should mourned in the appropriate manner.  However, being the responsible adult I never asked to be, I shall resist. 

Resist the pub anyway.

Q.I. is on TV. There are a few beers in the fridge. I'll keep those ghosts alive, drink to the dying season, to the fading traces of the holiday, to the memories of a lie-in.

After all, Monday is another day.  

Turn! Turn! Turn!

It’s approaching mid-July, and all over the country children are staring wistfully from classroom windows* at the azure celestial canopy, and the blazing trail of Helios as he makes his way through the heavens**.  And they wait. For within the week they will be set free from their shackles and be ejected into six weeks of give-not-a-fuck-about-anythingness. The summer holidays are almost upon us.

I’ll lay my deck of cards of bias out on the table of truth before I start this –I’m a teacher and have a vested interest in the long holidays we get. I love them, and they are the sole perk of the job***.

Elsewhere, in education land, Pob is at it again. Not content with fucking up every other aspect of the Education system, he’s now proposing that school term dates be set by headteachers.  To bastardise a popular, very irritating phrase – it’s decentralisation gone mad. Properly mad. Not Blackadder’s pencil-up-the-nose, underpants on head mad. Not even the madness of Charles VI of France – helpfully known as Charles the Mad - who thought he was made of glass. No – this is more of the calibre of Everyone’s Favourite Roman Emperor: Caligula. A man so mad he would have people tied upside down and chew at their testicles as punishment.  An Emperor so insane he tried to make his horse consul****. A proper nutter, you might say. A picnic short of a picnic.

The major problem with this idea – other than the mere fact it is Gove’s, and so arrives from his mouth already tainted by his brain, is that it seems to be working on the principle that schools are factories, students are products, and teacher are cunts. It is the brainchild of man who values neither brain nor child. And it designed to shorten the summer holidays, on the grounds that students aren't learning in every possible waking moment and if we allow this to continue China and Korea will invade and we'll be condemned to a future reliant on the Chinese economy and cheap imported goods from the far east. Or something equally ill-conceived. It is the unbaked idea of someone who thinks England's heyday was under Queen Victoria, and therefore we should return to said era for inspiration. 

Dickens lampooned the Victorian School System in the novels Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby, creating the monstrous establishments of Gradgrind and Dotheyboys respectively.  Coincidentally, Pob is in favour of all students reading a Dickens novel, despite the fact that it is beyond most adults.  In fact, most adults seem to think they’ve read a Dickens novel, but on close questioning it is usually ascertained that they have, in fact, seen Oliver! when they were at school, and remember watching Scrooge McDuck in Duck Tales.  

It seems clear from his two pronouncements that Pob is indeed familiar with the oeuvre of Mr. Dickens, but has made a seismic error- he thinks they are the ideas of his policy wonks, not social satire. With this realisation I now fully expect he shall look to Oliver Twist for ideas – instead of Work Related Learning, students not fluent in Latin by thirteen will be sent to the workhouse. He shall glean inspiration from Great Expectations, with students lacking social ambition sent to mad old spinsters to be bullied, mocked and forced to play arcane card games, like, Hello Mr Punch, Go-Johnny-Go-Go-Go and Bamalafizzfazz. And, in a masterstroke of imbecility, those children who fail to grasp the fundamentals of Christian Tradition will be visited by three strange men while they sleep, with threats of death and a shit Christmas.

In fact, Pob’s mission in life seems to be straightforward – to take all joy out of childhood; to squeeze the little blighters through the grinder of education; and to dehumanise both teachers and children alike. Life is not about being fitter, stronger, faster, better all the time. Sometimes it’s about just being. Being free to do nothing, to achieve nothing.  To rest while the cerebral fruits of academic labours take a root. To grow up, to explore, to be more than we were.  

Some of us may be stuck, sitting in classrooms, but we’re looking to the skies. School’s almost out for summer.  For teachers, it’s a chance to be people. For students, it’s a chance to become people. Take that away, and we condemn both to life of unquestioning servitude and burnout.

Sometimes, you’ve got to have time to sit on the dock on the bay, watching the tides. So, Pob, leave those kids alone.  They’re neither bricks in the wall, candles in the wind nor pawns in your game. In the words of a great sage, to everything there is a time.

It’s time to kick back, crack open a can of Stella, and give-not-a-fuck. For six glorious, lazy weeks. 

* Or climbing out of them, depending on the nature of the school and child

** Or the sun in the sky, for the more prosaically-minded

*** Not the sole reason, of course. We do it for the kids, innit.

****. an appointment whose ludicrous factor is only matched by CallMeDave’s appointment of an ill-informed ideologue a Secretary for State for Education.  

Little Britainers

We're spinning in space at 1070 miles an hour, and moving round the sun at 67, 000 miles an hour. We are the Third Rock from the Sun, as his very Reverend James Marshall Hendrix pointed out, and a blahhh of an American  sitcom flogged to a merciless death*.

The planet is a mind-blowing 4.54 billion years old**. Older than my jokes. Older than your gran's stories about getting tipsy on a charabanc to Morecambe. Older even than God.

Because God was invented by humans, and we're only about 200,000 years old.

Earth exists in the Goldilocks Zone - so called because conditions are just-right-for-life, not because we are a bunch of porridge-stealing, bear-baiting harridans. And, given the enormity of the Universe, which is itself 13.82 billion years old, the chances of life forming here are bogglingly small.

Our own existence as a species is so utterly improbable as to be almost miraculous. Not actually miraculous, mind, because that would imply the existence of some kind of godhead, and, like I said, that's one we made earlier, not the other way round.

Your own existence, and mine, and everyone who ever lived, is down to an even finer sliver of chance. The odds against any single one of us being is slimmer than a River Island model. Take a moment to absorb that. You shouldn't really be here, reading this. I shouldn't really be here, banging this out on a shitty Mac I've borrowed, which is making me wish Steve Jobs had actually really never been here. How do I right click this silver piece of technological evil? Why do Mac user swear by them? They're surely more deluded than Young Earthers.

Given that slightness of probability, I have a question for those who are posting the forthcoming nonesense on Facebook. Those of you who are Proud To Be British - what the fuck exactly are you proud of? You didn't choose to be British. You're here by an accident, a fluke, an unplanned and unpredictable explosion and scattering of dust the best part of 14 Billion years ago.

You might not be ashamed to British - although given that we are responsible for giving the universe Jeffrey Archer, Michael McIntyre, The Segway and the Mau Mau massacre I'd question that - but proud? Really? If your greatest achievement is to survive birth, you really ought to stretch yourself a bit.  Try consecutive thoughts perhaps? A completed sentence?

This may seem a minor point, but this jiggled thinking is the thin end of wedge which has resulted today in someone firebombing a mosque in Muswell Hill. Because what it really means, like a St. George's flag in a pub window, or a Swastika tattoo on your forehead - is simple. Proud To Be British is shorthand for - and I shall be polite about this - I'm a fucktardic xenophobic halfwit who'd rather identify myself as disliking and distrusting foreigners than celebrate the fact that I have one life, at one time, and, against all odds***, I am on this planet, spinning through space, with the rest of humanity, my fellow travellers in time and space.

And, instead of rejoicing in our common bonds, our shared histories and experiences, our many and varied cultures, and stories, and heroes and villains, and foods, I'm going to define myself by the fact that parents happened to be in this little corner of our little planet nine months after they shagged.

I'm picking on Britain, because  that's what I've seen on Facebook since the death of Lee Rigby. But the same ranty point is applicable to all.  We should mourn the death of one our own - a human - as is fitting. But remember - like the Borg - we are essentially the same the world over. We don't choose how we come in to the world, or where we come in. Your birth is your parents' achievement, not yours.

We are here together. Let's be here, together.


* It occurred to me that this programme is no longer on our screens, and I wondered what had happened to it. But I realised I don't care. I really do not care. Even less than I care whether Darma and/or Greg survived that car crash at the end of series two which was soooo clearly a desperate attempt to get given a third series. Which I hope they didn't. Because it was insult to the living. And the dead. And the yet-to-be-born.

* For those of a religious persuasion who think the earth is 6, 500 years old. You are utterly fucking insane. Ironically, I bet you also disbelieve evolution, while being closer to ours and apes' closest ancestors in intellect than most other member of homo sapiens sapiens. 

***Which reminds me, we also gave the world Phil Collins. We should hang our heads in heavy shame.