Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

I can only imagine what it’s like for someone who actually cares, but I for one am fed up with reading about the Anglican Church imploding over the vexed questions of women and/or gay bishops. So far the knotty problem of the first lesbian bishop has yet to be addressed.

It is my understanding, and I am quite willing to ignore corrections or facts to the contrary, that the Anglican Communion is an inclusive communion. Apparently it is, provided you are male and straight. The debate seems to rage whenever a few bishops come together in the same place. Instead of arguing over the best way to bring their message to their flocks¹, they are far more concerned with the sexuality and sex of the least necessary tier of the entire church.

As unrepentantly ungodly as I am, I have by tradition and culture, if not by faith, a streak of the puritan in my make up. I try to stand on it to be sure and I think that most of the time I am reasonably successful. Anyway, the point is who actually needs bishops? Apart from kicking up unwarranted fuss in a very un-Anglican manner, or at least a very un-Church of England manner and maybe there’s the problem: the bulk of Anglicans are no longer Church of England, where acceptance is so broad that it can cope with atheist vicars at one end and non-papal catholic priests at the other.

The English are by nature a very unobservant (in religious terms) lot and like their vicars to be seen gently dozing at village cricket matches, officiating over village fetes and getting into muddles with the church roof fund. Pretty much anything, in fact provided the refrain from bothering us with religion outside the formidable trinity of rituals concerning hatchings, matchings and despatchings. Anyone who actually cares about Christianity adopts any one of a number of reformed churches, chapels or Catholicism, depending on their relative preferences for comfort, terror, guilt, singing, beady-eyed fanaticism and/or incense.

In today’s Times there is an interesting article: in 1850, the weekly congregation for the Church of England was about three million. Eighty percent of babies were baptised into the CofE and the entire structure got by with 26 bishops. In 1945, the congregation had fallen to two million, baptisms into the CofE were down to 70% and the number of bishops had risen to Ninety. Sixty-three years further along, the relevant figures are 900,000, 15% and One hundred and fourteen. At this rate, by the end of the 21st century, the Church of England communion will be on first name terms with their own personal bishop.

My taxes are paying for this unrepresentative bunch of out of touch idiots. It galls me that church and state are so intermingled. Disestablish the buggers and let them get on with it.

Think of the money we can save and they will still be there for the odd times when they are actually useful.

¹Actually, now I think about it, this is the accidental benefit emerging from the issue: Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons are quite pesky enough, without Anglican clergy turning up on the doorstep uninvited with a flask of tea and a slice of Madeira cake, “Let’s talk ‘God’ and will you have a tombola ticket?”

Tedious beyond belief. Severe delays going home last night, severe delays coming in to work this morning. Signal failures at Highgate and then at East Finchley. This is the service I pat over £1,300 a year to use.

To add insult to injury, the announcer at Totteridge and Whetstone had an accent: “Ladies and Geddlemen. There are sibber dillies on the Northern Line due to earlier siggal failure at East Fwishley.” It would have been amusing had it not virtually been on loop. As it was, your mild mannered correspondent simply wished to wrench the tannoy off the post and shove it down someone’s throat.

It was clear that whoever recorded the message wasn’t paying any attention to what he was reading, either. After waiting ten minutes (and still no train, crowded or otherwise), the message changed to announce “minor delays” but with the added cryptic remark at the end “…but this is irrelevant for this station closure”.

I woke up all perky and rested. Now I just want to doze off again.

Speaking as a faceless bureaucrat, or as the French would have it, a fonctionaire, I am getting fed up with faceless bureaucrats.

Tomorrow it will be three months to the day since Dad died, and I have had my sister on the phone telling me that the County Council have written to Mum asking about progress on some non-existent bill for close on £1,000. Once again I am reduced to impotent rage as I have none of the details to hand, so cannot give the jabbering mongoose the bollocking he, she or it so richly deserves. In the meantime, while I’m awaiting details from my sister, so I can do so, I have to phone Mum at lunchtime to make sure she is OK since she is not really equipped for dealing with an uncaring bureaucracy.

Bah. This doesn’t really help my blood pressure, or, forgive the pun, my sang-froid. It just never ends.

D’you know it’s not fair?

Here we are, in the Dog Days of summer and I am covered in insect bites and smeared with Anthisan to stop the itching. I have managed to get through the entire summer without the merest hint of an insect bite and now I seem to be the main course for at least one of the little blighters.

Somewhere in The Tower there is a mosquito (or similar) snuggled away in a dark corner, lying on its back clutching its belly and snoring contentedly. It must be the size of a small dog by now the amount of times it’s sunk its bloody fangs into me.

Well not for much longer, matey. Ho No.

On my way home tonight I am going to buy the biggest and most toxic can of Raid I can find, and I am going to empty it into the stairwell, bed and computer rooms. There will be no hiding from my vengeance.

It occurs to me that the damned insect must be wearing sneakers, because it must be too large to fly now, gorged as it is on my blood, yet I never hear it coming.

I must get a photo if at all possible…

You can tell I haven’t had a great deal of experience with bit torrents, and burning videos to disk. I like to think, though, that I’m a fast learner. Well, fast insofar as I might not know what to do, but I quickly pick up on what not to do.

Over the weekend as reported previously, I downloaded the most recent episodes of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica. So far so good. Now I haven’t watched these yet; I want to drop them onto CDs because I have friends who would like to watch them, and I’d like to see them on TV rather than my PC simply because I know how to fix the brightness and contrast on TV (I have a theory that on my PC it will involve downloading some media player upgrade that will cost money, and I don’t feel like doing that, thank you very much).

Anyway, last night, I started the transcoding and burning process. My PC, courtesy NERO, cheerfully reported that the target disk had enough space for two 45 minute episodes in VCD format, so I thought I’d stick SG-1 ep 3 and Atlantis ep 3 on the same disk. No problem, and convenient, to boot. The transcoding took about an hour and a half, and then NERO reports that the target disk is too small.

There is a marginal rise in blood pressure.

Undaunted, I abandon that job (NERO Likes to call them jobs, see), and set it up to transcode a single episode as an SVCD. Plenty of room on the disk for that, but the slow burning technique adopted by my PC now slides back to crock pot speed, and at 1% every three – four minutes, I decide to let the bugger do it overnight.

This morning, I awake to find the procedure has aborted; I can’t remember the problem, but there was a deal of swearing involved, and a further rise in blood pressure.

Third time lucky. One episode, one disk, transcode to VCD format. Forty minutes start to finish. Done. Why didn’t I just do that in the first place?

Mind you, apart from writing the episode number on the disk, and putting it a case, I haven’t watched it yet. What odds it still doesn’t work, and I’ve wasted a CD ROM?

Pah.