Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Welcome back, Old Friend.

The surreal aspect of life has been on holiday recently, presumably because the Silly Season¹ just closing has more than made up for it.

The last gasp of the silly season is probably provided by that loveable old loony, Ringo Starr. Ringo has announced that he will no longer sign memorabilia and all fan mail will be dumped after 20 October as he is far too busy².

"Nothing will be signed after the 20th of October. If that is the date on the envelope, it's gonna be tossed.
"I'm warning you with peace and love I have too much to do," the 68-year-old drummer said.

The heat has clearly got to the poor old sod. Of course, it may be one of his little jokes, after all, how many ‘Peace and Loves’ does anyone need in a recorded statement?

Closer to home, and fuller evidence that the oddness of London is gearing up for a vintage season, I have to report that I travelled into the office this morning in a Tube carriage containing both Robert Mugabe and Charles Manson. The former was very dapper in a bespoke navy pinstripe tree-piece with pocket handkerchief. He kept himself very much to himself as is becoming of a foreign dictator travelling on the London Underground. Charles Manson, looking suitably unkempt and minus his trademark swastika tattoo (again, presumably because he was off duty), was sitting quietly reading a magazine about Confucianism. A change of direction for the old madman, then?

Oh well, real life intrudes and I have to go and do some work.

Peace and Love, Man. Peace and Love^{© Ringo Starr 2008}.

¹That part of the year when news is generally perceived to be in short supply; traditionally in the UK from late July to mid October, particularly August and early September when people are on their holidays and Parliament is in Recess, with relatively little happening on the political front.(Bank collapse notwithstanding).

²As Wogan pointed out on the radio this morning, all thinking people know that Ringo hasn’t been busy for years. While this isn’t strictly true, he’s hardly the draw he was even ten years after his old band (the name escapes me) split.

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?”

Can the End Times be far away?.

Watch out for the Four Horsemen¹; bureaucracy is on the march.


¹Provided they can obtain the necessary permits.

Somebody talk me out of bidding on three Opus the Penguin plushes on e-bay.

Fair warning: "You don't need them" won't work.

When I was a kid I looked after my toys. They got the odd chip in the paintwork from being played with if they were particular favourites, but by and large they didn't suffer much damage. Some of the more fragile plastic ones would get glued together when inevitable accidents occurred, but even they would not be harshly treated until the signs of obvious repair became to great to meet my exacting standards¹.

Once a plastic model had deteriorated to the point of no return, it was fair game for destruction in the back garden with games involving stones, marbles and as many vocally-generated Ba-booms as I could manage. In Telford there is even a house with a busted model of Stingray built into its foundations, though that was accidental as it hadn't quite reached the level of degeneration required for toy martyrdom,² and somewhere out on what the locals call the cinder-hills if they haven't been built on yet, there is a very weathered 40 year old catapault-fired Fireball XL-5 glider I lost when I was 7. I think it disappeared into a gorse bush, but that's only a guess. I never found it again much to my annoyance.

Anyway, the point is, that the metal toys, being generally more robust tended not to meet this sort of fate. When I finally grew out of toys, several neighbours' kids and junior cousins inherited a fair collection of toy cars and such pretty much in full working order, and only partially scratched or chipped.

Except for my Batmobile which one day fell victim to an unexpected and still unexplained bout of vandalism involving a claw hammer, a bottle of lighter fluid and a box of matches. I have always rather regretted that act of destruction, and have never properly explained to myself why I did it, other than noting thatI wished I hadn't done it almost as soon as I'd finished smashing it to smithereens.

Now, nostalgia is a wonderful thing, and I do have a fair collection of pointless if not worthless goo-gaws and totems around the house (excepting, of course, the TARDISes, which are neither worthless nor totems)³. It occurred to me that e-bay is the place to go to acquire a nostalgia-fuelled replacement for the toy I destroyed all those years ago. It would look nice collecting dust on the shelf along with John Steed's Bentley⁴. So I looked on e-bay with a view to bidding on a 1966 Corgi Models' 267 Batmobile (It had to be the 1966 version 267 as the early 1970's re-issues did not have the red bat-logo on the wheels, and some had towing hooks for the Batboat, for Heaven's sake. My standards haven't fallen that far).

If I still drank strong liquor, I should have had to calm myself with a double scotch.

You should see the prices even quite tatty models are fetching out there! It's insane. All the more so when I consider that the toy I had probably cost my parents around 5/- (25p) back then. Even allowing for forty years' inflation, that does not work out at £399.99 as I have seen a couple going for (I doubt they'll sell with an opening bid at that price, but I have seen them creep up in bidding wars from around £30 to well over £200). I still occasionally look to see what they are currently fetching on e-bay -this weekend in fact, thus this post- but this ritual has turned into a sort of morbid curiosity, which is laced with a deeper regret that I smacked the bejasus out of something that would have netted me a handsome profit all these years later.

Thank the Lord that I managed to hold onto all my old Lee & Kirby Fantastic Fours from the 1960s!



¹Exacting to the point that I wouldn't mix toys of different scales beyond a certain point. I could just about accept a 1/72 scale Airfix aeroplane in the same game as an 00 scale Corgi car, the pilots were just rather tall, which of course they should be, since being a fighter pilot was a very glamorous job; but I looked with contempt at those kids who played happily with a 1/100 scale Matchbox double-decker bus and a 1/48 tank in the same game. What were they thinking?

²Someday archaeologists will wonder about the significance of this little plastic "ritual" object. If only I could be there to see their faces.

³Not in my little world they're not, thank you very much. Stop giggling at the back.

⁴It is a sign of how far my standards have slipped since I was 10 in that it does not worry me that the Corgi model of the car is based upon the 1927 Bentley in British Racing Green, whereas John Steed actually drove a 1935 Bentley in British Racing Green.