Here comes the rain again

I spent most of the weekend catching up on my e-mail backlog, trying to put our household accounts in order, almost had it sorted and then another wave hit on Monday afternoon.

When not lying down in a darkened room, I have been mostly busying myself with what I describe as my basket-weaving activities. I have been making Christmas decorations, crackers and presents for people. Except half these projects I know I am not going to be able to finish in time, least of all because I need to be better in order to complete them. For example, I had the idea of sorting out some place-mats for my parents because they have a few from various ancient sets, never enough that match when people come round. So I bought some suitable MDF etc, only I’ve got to paint on them, properly paint. I can apply paint to stuff, but my hand-eye co-ordination is crap right now and I can’t really sit in a suitable position for any length of time. And this implies that I am a good painter when in better health, which is highly disputable.

Mostly I have been stringing beads onto wire and making Christmas decorations. Incredibly time-consuming and pointless activity, but it is a mindless distraction and at the end of the day I have material evidence of my own labours.

At some point I am going to have to come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to finish my book before the end of the year, which is a terrifically demoralising prospect. But for now I shall pretend I have more time than I do.

On a more positive note, this morning I received a photograph of my friend Mary and her fellow novices in the convent in Saint-Pern that her mother sent to me. It is the first I have seen of her about eighteen months. I hope to get some sort of note at Christmas (she’s allowed to write to her friends once a year) and it’ll be another eighteen months before I might actually see her in person again. She looks happy. She’s gone for the whole black and white look, which is very in this season.

Anyway, I made the tissue-paper crowns for the Christmas crackers (which are the campest crackers you ever did see; they are quite vulgar) but now I need some really bad jokes. So far I’ve got

Q. What’s red and really stupid?
A. A blood clot.

When I am king, you will be first against the wall

Following Marmite Boy’s Reasons to be Cheerful (not) and Lady Bracknell’s entry If Lady Bracknell Ruled The World, I thought I would have a go at world domination. My first attempt included such things as the Compulsory Vote (with option to abstain), Proportional Representation, deprivatisation of the rail industry and double council tax on second homes. But I thought these weren’t really in the spirit of the thing, so instead, here is the relatively trivial legislation my reign of tyranny would bring about.

1. T-shirts with slogans on should be banned. There are a handful of humorous exceptions, but the vast majority of them are immensely irritating and lower the wearer in my esteem. Everything from those FCUK items through to any tight-fitting t-shirt which says Sexy! or Gorgeous! across the chest, as if labelling an item thus may effect its nature. I especially object to sexual propositions or misogynist assertions in t-shirt-form. What is that about?

2. Everybody should adhere to a strict code of etiquette in their use of technology. When the phone rings during a television programme, either turn the television off (we have videos) or don’t answer the telephone (we have answer-machines). When guests arrive, the television on in the corner of the room is not conducive to comfort and fluid conversation – if children are present they can either bugger off, play quietly or engage in conversation like everyone else. When conducting a conversation on the phone or in person, one must resist the temptation to conduct a second conversation by text message. Technology gives us the power to do what we want, when we want. Surely we can take advantage of this such that we give each task and indeed one another, our fullest attention?

3. All food manufacturers should be limited one layer of packaging. This is both an environmental issue and a consideration for less dextrous crips. Of course it looks nicer if it is in a box as well as being wrapped in foil or cellophane or whatever but it is essentially unnecessary. Like the packets of chocolate biscuits I have opened for my arthritic grandmother. They come in a cardboard box but inside they are wrapped in cellophane and inside the cellophane they are wrapped in paper and inside the paper they are wrapped in foil. They don’t taste any better for my efforts.

4. A complete ban on all Women’s Magazines. In truth my dictatorship would result in greater freedom of expression than we have now, but I hate hate hate hate hate hate these publications. Typical contents of a Women’s Magazine for those who have never read one;

Page
1 True story - How submitting to violence saved my marriage.
2 Eat yourself slim – how gnawing off your own leg could lose lbs overnight
3 Recipe: Triple Chocolate Gateau
5 Fat Cows – How being even slightly overweight makes you entirely worthless.
8 Your man is probably cheating on you – find out with our fun quiz!
12 Recipe: Mars Bar Fritters
20 The Suffragette Diet – it won them the vote; it can make you a size 10
32 Fashion - This season’s ninety-seven must-have items that you can't afford
52 Beauty Feature - This week, anti-aging creams for the under-12s.
84 Made-up Problems - Are you too suffering with this thing we just made up?
136 Love Feature - Blackmail your way up the aisle
220 Recipe: Lard chunks with a sunflower-oil dip
356 You’re probably a neurotic bitch-troll from hell – find out with our fun quiz!
576 Money Feature - How to defraud credit card applications
932 Careers - We talk to a feisty woman who has a job, but really bad skin.
1508 Health - The ten diseases most likely to kill you.
2440 Sex Feature - How to fake a mind-blowing orgasm!
3948 Horroscope - Your life isn’t your own; it’s in the hand of the stars.

They really are that bad. Please double the amount of pornography produced if the shevles need filling; it is significantly less demeaning to women.

Sigh. Ah well, got that out of my system. Can't really think of anything else. Really very tolerant type, me. This despite the fact that I've had a tiny tiny bead rolling around under the keys of this keyboard, jamming keys at random (well not quite random - it seemed particularly keen on vowels and backspace). Aagh!

We'll drink, we'll drink, we'll drink

I am actually feeling a lot better today so thought I must share this fact with you. Yesterday I thought I was going spontaneously combust, I was so ill and fed up. That is an odd way of putting it but there it is. This morning, perhaps partly thanks to a rather rude awakening, I am feeling much more positive and happy. And indeed, my brain seems to have engaged.

Need your advice please. Last night, after feeling so sorry for myself for the preceding forty-eight hours or so I decided to make a list of resolutions that may speed up my recovery or at least reduce my state of misery at this time.

One of the problems I have is a killer sore throat and a terrific thirst – it is difficult to differentiate between the two. First thing in the morning, it is too painful to speak and I am thirsty all the time. I drink a pint or two of fluid every hour, not much caffeine at all. And naturally, I’m often up and down needing the loo.

One of the drinks I have a lot of is Ribena because it is very easy to make and it is very soothing on my throat. Unfortunately, I am kind of aware that this isn’t actually going to help much with hydration – all that sugar is going to irritate my kidneys and make me pee more, so I’m going to be more thirsty. Like in diabetes.

The only other things which are soothing for my throat are alcohol – which is even worse from this perspective - and Camomile tea. Unsweetened camomile tea is really very soothing to the throat but even that is a diuretic. And anything I drink, I drink in quantity, because I need so much. Sucking sweets is no good as I have a mouth ulcer issue. During The Sinister Case of the Ever-Expanding Bosom last year, the doctor suggested sucking on a lemon in order to abate my thirst, but that doesn’t help my throat much and just because I tested clear for one condition (diabetes) this does not mean that my thirst - such thirst - does not have a physiological cause. It isn't comfort-drinking and I can't imagine, given everything else that is going on, that this one symptom is psychosomatic.

So, does anybody have any idea of something I can drink which is not high in sugar or any other diuretic, but is soothing for the throat? Most of the time, this is a minor issue, but just now trips to the kitchen and loo are using up a great proportion of what little energy I have. Any suggestions much appreciated.

You got your Mother in a whirl; She's not sure if your a boy or a girl.

transvest, tranz-vest', v.t. and v.i. to dress onself in the clothes of another, esp. of the opposite sex.-adj. transvest'ic.-n. and adj. transvestite (-vest'-it), (one) given to this.-ns. transvest'ism; tranvest'itism. [Pfx.trans-, and L. vestis-vestire, vestitum, to dress; cf. travesty.]

So says my Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1974 edition). I know perhaps a writer ought to possess a dictionary published within her own lifetime, but I like to read words such Frisbee, econut and pneumothorax in the Supplement.

Of course, in a modern dictionary the word gender would presumably replace the word sex. Sex is now understood as a purely biological identity; what you have in your pants and your chromosomes, your maleness or femaleness.Gender is the societal construct of masculinity and feminity so dress comes firmly under this.

Even so, some people believe that nature plays a part in what we wear, that for example women are predetermined to be very much invested in their physical appearance whereas men have more important things to think about. Such speculation is made in the context of the last hundred and fifty years where the pinnacle of masculine fashion has been, quite literally, uniformity. Both my grandfathers, all four great grandfathers and indeed a few of my great great grandfathers were soldiers or sailors at some time in their lives. During peacetime, men began to wear a different sort of uniform; the suit and tie or the dinner jacket and bow tie. For millennia women have been complaining that all men are the same, but it is really only in the last two centuries that we have begun to dress them this way.

Before then and throughout much of history, men and women have been more or less equally concerned with self-ornamentation: clothes, jewellery, make-up and defoliation. And indeed there have been periods where modesty was such a highly valued virtue in women that we dressed very plainly and men were comparative peacocks. Such cultures arguably exist elsewhere in the world today.

Modern Western man, it seems, embraces the idea that evolution compels him to compete in all areas of life from the football pitch to the corridors of power, but conveniently ignores the fact that this competition is about sexual selection. Thus what a chap looks like, how he dresses and grooms himself, may be of far more importance to any potential mate than whether he can beat his mate Barry at darts. Yet many men pride themselves on a total and absolute disinterest in their appearance.

For heterosexual women, this must be a great tragedy because there is rarely anything nice to look at. Meanwhile, women feel that so much of their innate value is tied up in their attractiveness to men that many of us spend a great deal of energy and endure considerable discomfort in order to comply to an entirely artificial standard of beauty – something which has very little to do with sexual attraction. If it was all about sexual stimulus, far fewer of us would be on a diet and none of us would shave our armpits.

Men suffer a greater tragedy because they are allowed even less room for self-expression through dress. As a woman, I am allowed to wear clothes designed and manufactured for men. Men’s socks, for example, are a better wearing design for less expense and come in sedate colours rather than multicoloured stripes or infantile cartoons. Men’s boxer-shorts are superior to the thong if one wishing to avoid a visible panty-line. Men’s shirts, if bought several times too large, are far cheaper and more practical than ladies’ night-dresses. I can confess to such deviation without inviting any doubt over my femininity.

However when a man prefers texture, fit or even the sensation of constraint in ladies clothing, he is considered rather odd. Why? Women’s clothes are sold on texture, because we enjoy touching things which are silky, velvety, lacey, we enjoy colour, shininess and sparkle. However, this stuff has an appeal to all of us. Women like looking at it and touching it and men like looking at it and touching it. Why, then, are women the only ones allowed to wear it?

Of course modern masculinity is largely defined by being all that is not feminine, whereas femininity has always been slightly more pragmatic. I have never really understood the common use of the word ‘effeminate’ to refer to men who do not conform to the construct. 'Camp' men are nothing like women at all. Julian Clary or Graham Norton are not like any women I have ever met. Campness, male homosexuality and all associated eccentricities are an integral part of masculinity; gay men are not women with dingle-dangles. Yet the idea that they are, perpetuates straight male fears of losing his masculinity through the slighest frivolity.

The very idea that transvestism or a particular interest in clothes is indicative of homosexuality is ridiculous anyway. Many gay men I know have dabbled in drag, but in a very public way, as a joke, a play on expectations I suppose. I can’t imagine many gay man being turned-on by wearing women’s underwear for example, because he has probably spent a lifetime of almost total disinterest in women's underwear, unlike many of his straight counterparts.

I don’t mean to suggest that all straight men want to dress up in women’s clothing only that it would by no means be against nature if they did. It is certainly not against nature that many men wish to dress in an attractive way. My Mum actually threw out my Dad's cuban heels because she felt they made him look effeminate. [...] gets a lot of leg-pulling from my culturally conservative family because he likes to dress up full stop. Not in women’s clothes particularly, but just so he looks nice. Fortunately we live in Whitby where it is okay to dress up as a vampire or a pirate or whatever the heck you like without provoking comment.

During Goth weekend it is possible to play a game where you sit in a pub and guess the sex of each person who walks in. I must admit I did laugh inside once when talking to one beautiful lady Goth with a very deep voice in a Wakefield accent and an Adam’s apple. I asked her what she did for a living and she said “Tree Surgeon.” In my head I found myself singing He cuts down trees, he wears high-heels, suspenders and a bra…

And I must issue a word of caution. When a person has dressed according to the conventions of his gender for years and years and he begins to explore his full identity for the first time through dress, he is perhaps better off doing it behind closed doors as opposed to on the seafront at Brighton. I know that Adrian and indeed the people of Brighton would want me to post this picture here, if only as a warning to others. And anyway, he can’t complain too bitterly when it’s already on-line.

Anyway, I have now perhaps detracted from the sincere point I was trying to make, which was that we should all cast off conventions of dress and express ourselves fully as individuals, regardless of gender or sexuality. But I have kind of lost my thread now...

Tangerine Trees and Marmalade Skies

My increased pain meds are doing me a lot of good, much more than I expected. I am however experiencing things that aren’t really happening. This is something I have always had with the opioids, but there is a marked difference between codeine and trammadol.

Codeine is a thoroughly unpleasant drug. I can't imagine why people take it, morphine or heroine (which all create the same chemical reaction in your brain, only to different degrees) for fun. It really clouds your mind and then when you have weird experiences, they become very confusing and distressing. I have to say the weird things I experienced on codeine seemed to be especially evocative. Like coming into a room and smelling tobacco and saw-dust. This is the smell of my Granddad’s shed where he did his carpentry and the smell I associate with my Granddad. However, suddenly smelling this out of the blue whilst having a skull full of cotton wool was apt to bring on tears.

With the trammadol the experiences are perhaps more vivid, but not in the least bit distressing. Trammadol doesn't knock me out at all - at least not so I'd know it. And I think perhaps the fact I am more awake when things happen mean I am better at reasoning with them. For example, when I was calling a taxi on Monday to go to the doctors, I became concerned about the curious smell in the corner of my living room. It was kind of sweet but very chemical. And then it occurred to me that it was the smell of the air-freshener in the taxi, which I had apparently summoned up in association with the taxi driver’s voice. Even when it occurred to me that this was the case, it only seemed to fade when I put the phone down.

Since the increased dose, such experiences are becoming more frequent. On Thursday evening a bat flew over my head from behind me before vanishing at the other side of the room. I imagine it was a random bit of electrical activity in my brain which I would otherwise not have noticed. And I wasn’t in the least bit frightened, only startled and I realised as soon as it vanished that it had never been there. The only way in which this sort of thing causes difficulty is in the evening if I try to watch a film. Little bits of light from passing cars, even in a fully lit room, become significant objects like a white mouse scuttling across the floor and even though it only takes me an instant to realise I have imagined it, it has already distracted me from the screen.

No voices though and never the tremendous sense of menace which is perhaps worse than a hallucination. When I have had mental ill health, I have had experiences whereby words pop out of a page - or indeed text in any form. I was really struck when watching A Beautiful Mind which contained sequences where John Nash experiences this exact same thing, which I had imagined (as you arrogantly do) was entirely unique to me. The very first time this happened and indeed the very first time I ever hurt myself on purpose was actually on Prozac. I had been fine before, GP acknowledged my mental good health but suggested fluoxitine might 'stimulate my nervous system'. Went quite insane within the week. Completely better as soon as it was all out of my system a week later, but it did scar me in two senses. Horrible stuff. GP insisted it had nothing to do with the pills, but this was before anyone suggested that SSRIs had such negative potential, especially for fifteen year-olds. Ho hum.

However, what I get with trammadol is just fine, it is otherwise a dream drug really.

In other news, this evening I have been sitting with the lights off and the blinds up watching five simultaneous fireworks displays on the other side of town. I also learnt that my brother-in-law Adrian has got a new post as the organist for St. Mary’s Church in Southampton (big church in Southampton). So congratulations to him!

Something bad happened today, in that my electric wheelchair, confined to the shed downstairs which is extremely damp (it is embedded in the hillside) is going mouldy. My electric wheelchair is very precious to me. The fact that it has sat idle for a couple of months is rather demoralising. I have either got to get better and start using it again very quickly, or we’re going to have to carry it upstairs and keep it indoors for a while. A little thing I guess, but a decision I didn’t want to face.

We have been invited to Whitby Pete’s birthday party next April. Since it is next April, I shall assume that I will be loads better by then and able to go. Pete is going to attend as his alter-ego the Grand Duchess Gladys of Belconnia. He has a beard these days so I’m not sure quite how he is going to pull it off…

ICD-10, G93.3

In recent weeks I have become anxious about where my health is going. This is an almost inevitable consequence of relapse, but there are other factors involved such as the fact that it is now approaching three years since the major relapse which marked a sudden yet so far permanent deterioration in my health. And I don’t know what that means. Seems I’ve spent the last three years waiting to return to the level I was before and it ain't happened.

And it is going to sound really pathetic, but I’m dreading my twenty-fifth birthday next month. During the first few years of illness, birthdays were a time for despair because it was another year which I felt I had missed out on, time was passing without my actually progressing through life. And sixteen, seventeen, eighteen; important years, supposedly. I then managed to shake this off and have been fine since, but twenty-five!

I suppose the truth is that I always held up twenty-five as an age by which all this must be resolved; everything would be sorted by then, had to be sorted. If nothing else, I would grow out of it. And also twenty-five is a terribly grand age when I have achieved precisely nothing in my life so far and have never had a job. Well, apart from writing for Ouch, which I did all of once and won’t be allowed to do again. And then there’s the small matter of the three GCSEs… three… no A-Levels or degree. Just three incy-wincy teeny-weeny GCSEs. Three, I tell you.

I also comforted myself at my eighteenth and twenty-first birthday that come my twenty-fifth I’d be able to go out and get pissed with my mates and make up for the lack of celebration on these more significant dates. In fact, even if I am fully over this blip back to the levels of the summer, I shall still be worse come this birthday than I was at either my eighteenth or twenty-first.

I went to the doctors on Monday. In the waiting room there was a small child dressed as a pumpkin - I wanted to say to its anxious looking father, “You realise it is just a costume, don’t you? Your child hasn’t really turned into a pumpkin.” It had been a tremendous effort to get there and somehow I felt short-changed, even though my pain-relief was upped. But basically there is nothing he can do.

And this, together with concern from my folks manifesting itself in a renewed level of interest and various weird and wonderful suggestions, has got me researching my condition again. Just to see if there’s anything I am missing. Just to see if there’s anything happened in the years since my last serious look. Well of course there have been new bits and bobs but I don’t see how they could be put to good use. There are however some bits of information which I really should avoid on a bad day but can’t very well help tripping over on the Internet. There’s:

1. Personal accounts from people who somehow got this diagnosis but got better through the power of prayer, sticking raw carrots in every orifice or some such nonsense. The heart sinks. Especially as some of these people are so evangelical about it; if you don’t have faith, they you can’t really want to improve.


2. In-fighting between people with this condition, about the name of the thing, subgroups, the cause of the thing, treatment regimes, prognoses, all sorts of crap. I am really not taking well to conflict just now. There are some people who just thrive on the idea they are being held down and misunderstood.


3. Mortality rates and specifically, accounts about people who have died from my condition. All the time I'm fighting a constant succession of minor infections, usually two or three at the same time, but I am never seriously ill with any of them and in time they all pass. But eventually some people have their immune system completely overwhelmed, minor infections become major infections; organs fail – like AIDS death, basically. A small proportion, ten percent and even then, well, much later on I should think. But I don’t want to think about it and I suppose I would rather not know about it. At least not when things are going badly. My life is in no danger just now, I mean not nearly. I might as well be considering how my childlessness and early menarche heighten my risk of breast cancer.
   


4. Poetry. Any kind of poetry about illness.
   
   Oh woe is me!
   Life is unfair!
   I have [insert condition]
   And nobody cares.
   I’m so very very ill
   I can barely even walk
   I want to kill (myself)
   With a plastic fork.
   
   For some reason I always think of that great First World War hero, Lord Flashheart who said “Just because I can give multiple orgasms to the furniture just by sitting on it, doesn't mean that I'm not sick of this damn war: the blood, the noise, the endless poetry.”

Ho hum. So anyway, I got to the end of this exercise with the sense that nothing has changed and nothing is likely to change any time soon - there is an imminent revolution in the way my condition is diagnosed - a single blood-test as opposed to a lengthy process of elimination - but that's not really my issue.

At school my nickname was Neil because I was tall, had long brown hair and sat around cross-legged, rattling on about peace and harmony. Today I fear I am living up to it in other ways. "I might as well be a Leonard Cohen record." Sorry guys.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Warning: A very boring political post but something I had to get out of my system. It is rambling and incoherent but once it's said it's said and I can move on with other things.

"The issue of incitement to religious hate is a tiny part of a much broader pattern that we are attempting, collectively, to put together, to create a society where cohesion, tolerance and understanding are natural, where people can settle their differences in ways that don't develop hate and where people feel free to be able to express sensible views and have sensible arguments." - David Blunkett as Home Secretary.

I realise Blunkett hasn’t been Home Secretary for a while, but this isn’t about him. As some of my more moustachioed readers may be aware, I don’t buy into slippery slope arguments. That’s not to say I don’t know a dangerous idea when I see one. The Race and Religious Hatred Bill is dangerous, not because of where it might lead us, but because it is founded on the above, very dangerous, ideas. We’re back on John Stuart Mill again folks;

1. There has never been a really good idea which seemed ‘sensible’ when it was first uttered. This is a hackneyed truism that all nutty fringe groups wheel out when accused of being… nutty fringe groups. However, it is true. It isn’t the case that because the slave-abolitionists were treated as nutcases, today’s nutcases will be tomorrow’s heroes, but some of them may well be. Some of them have got to be, after all, unless this is the absolute peak of civilisation (please God no). There will be new ideas and it seems unlikely that we’re all going to see the sense in them the minute they come out. Even if this wasn’t the case, who is to say what is a sensible view and what is extreme?


2. Often people who expressing extreme views touch upon an element of truth or an important point even though in its entirity their argument doesn't stand up.

3. Even when people are totally wrong, by challenging our arguments they keep them fresh and vital.

These three points can be illustrated rather well with the case of the Animal Rights Movement. There was a time when received opinion did not consider animals to have any moral significance. One interpretation of the Bible puts us in the privileged position of stewardship. Descartes compared animals to automaton without any true experience (they didn’t think therefore they weren’t – oh really Descartes was a tit). It seems very strange that we could ever imagine that animals didn’t have feelings, including those of fear, pain and distress. Isn’t it glaringly obvious?

Now it could be that in the future, we come to realise that it is wrong to treat animals as property and to kill them for food at all, just as we now understand that it is wrong to treat human beings as property to be used, abused and discarded at will. For most people this does not seem like a sensible idea at the moment, but given the cultural turnaround we have made over not entirely dissimilar matters, it is surely not beyond the realms of imagination?

Even if it is perfectly okay to kill animals for food, that is not to say that much of what the Animal Rights Movement says is not entirely valid. One of the reasons I abandoned vegetarianism is that after three months of academic study on the issue and perhaps one too many essays by Peter Singer, it occurred to me that I wasn’t morally disgusted at the idea of killing a wide-eyed fluffy bunny and eating it for my tea. In fact it may be fair to say that Peter Singer instilled me with a zoocidal blood lust but that’s beside the point. However, I also realised more than ever that the way we ‘process’ our meat products is morally reprehensible. My fluffy bunny suffered perhaps a moment’s anticipation and a single instance of pain after a happy life hopping about in the fields *. My Kentucky Fried Chicken had a far worse fate.

And sometimes they get it completely and utterly wrong. One conclusion that Peter Singer’s particular warped brand of utilitarianism leads him to is that some animals have a greater moral status than tiny human babies and some severely impaired adults. This is not even partially correct, but by making such an assertion he challenges us to consider what it is that makes a person worthy of moral consideration and whether indeed there is a hierarchy. By saying “The grass is pink” we are forced to consider how it is we understand the grass to be green.

No this of course has nothing much to do with religion as such, but religion is a just another point of view. Of course religion may be interconnected with ethnicity and culture and when people use the word ‘choice’ they over-simplify the situation. I could not choose to be a Catholic because I could not persuade myself to believe what Catholics believe. My friend Mary could not chose to be an agnostic because she could not persuade herself to believe what I don’t believe. However, there are many other points of view we would find similar difficulty in adopting, none of which are related to my ethnicity or upbringing.

When Mary decided to become a nun I was horrified. But the thing I kept finding myself comparing it to was a friend getting married to someone that I vehemently disapproved of. I might even use the word hate. I hate what I perceive to be the misogyny of the Catholic church, I hate the way that I watch the doctrine sustaining the poverty, over-population and disease pandemics in the Third World upon which it depends to keep the masses faithful. I hate a Church that forbade the Catholic women in Bosnia to use oral contraceptives during a period they were subject to mass-rape, a Church that protected child abusers within their own ranks etc, etc. I don’t hate Catholics; a large proportion of my family are Catholic and many of my friends. They are good people. But that machine, that Church, is fairly abhorrent to me.

[Naturally I didn’t put it like this to Mary. All I could do was to express my disapproval and then go on to offer my full support. She is my friend and her happiness is paramount to me.]

Now, the Pope is a regular reader of this blog and doesn't like it when I say such things. However, simply by out-lawing my feelings - or the expression of them - would not change anything. The only way I could be dissuaded is if somebody sat me down and put me right about any misconceptions I have, argued with me. Of course it might be I like to hate Catholicism and I’m not going to listen, but then, what does this matter? If I were to attack priests or desecrate Catholic graves, I would be breaking existing laws. If I were to rally an angry mob outside the homes of Catholics I would be breaking existing laws. Freedom of speech has always been conditional; you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre and direct incitement to violence has always been a crime.

But at the end of the day, conflict is natural. Cohesion is not. The law is not about surpressing nature, but about creating a society where everyone is free to express themselves as much as possible without impinging on the freedom of others to express themselves. When Isaiah Berlin talked about liberty he kept reiterating this fact with the concept of The Final Solution; the utopian idea used by very many political and religious movements that through a restriction of certain freedoms, we would all come to see things the same and live in harmony. It is a useful term to bear in mind.

And what are we left with after we have out-lawed ideas that make us feel uncomfortable? Does it stop the bad guys? The previous Incitement to Racial Hatred laws (race at least being something you can’t help) leave us with this:

“The British National Party exists to secure a future for the indigenous peoples of these islands in the North Atlantic which have been our homeland for millennia. We use the term indigenous to describe the people whose ancestors were the earliest settlers here after the last great Ice Age and which have been complemented by the historic migrations from mainland Europe. The migrations of the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Norse and closely related kindred peoples have been, over the past few thousands years, instrumental in defining the character of our family of nations.” - First paragraph of the Mission Statement, British National Party web-site.

Apart from the fact that the Norman Conquest brought vast numbers of French people onto our soil, the following decades established the first Jewish communities in the UK. There had been Jews here before, but not communities. Thus the cut-off for immigration ends a thousand years ago. Translation:

"We exist to secure a future for the white non-Jewish people of this country."

Fortunately, you’d have to be really thick not to notice the absence of the Romans. But then, what have the Romans ever done for us? Well, there was the aquaduct…

* I didn’t actually catch and kill a fluffy bunny with my bare hands. I just realised I could if I was hungry enough. And could run fast. And didn’t actually look the thing in the eye as I broke its neck. And hadn’t just read Watership Down.