In my teens, I wore a St. Christopher pendant round my neck. Not because I had any kind of affinity with St. Christopher, or even any idea of who he was, but because it was a craze going round at the time. When I got older, and better able to make an informed choice, I got rid of St. Christopher and took up with St. Michael. It was a sort of epiphany, I suppose, and it happened in M&S’s Barnsley branch, that’s where I became a disciple.
Marks & Spencer didn’t cater for spiritual needs but a great many of my material ones were catered for there. M&S was a rock on the High Street that was, to me, what the church is to any Christian. Their lack of facility for redeeming my soul was more than compensated for by their ability to supply me with a decent quality pair of jeans at a reasonable price.
Their range of stock was neither the most diverse nor cheapest but you knew that whatever you bought would be of good quality and very unlikely to give any cause for complaint. For years, virtually every stitch I wore had St. Michael on the label.
And their food department was no less reliable. Again, the range was limited but what they did sell could be counted on to be first class. They used to sell wedges of cheesecake that I have never elsewhere been able to get the like of, and ice cream that was, likewise, not to be found anywhere else. The first and finest yogurt I ever tasted came from M&S. But I should have known it was all too good to last. One day when I went into the store everything looked different; something seemed to be missing, or rather, somebody.
It was a dark day when St. Michael got his marching orders, and hardly brightened when the likes of Per Una and the M&S Collection breezed in and tried to fill his shoes. How is a man supposed to feel any pride in wearing Blue Harbour under pants? What happened to the food department was no less than tragic. Gone was the small but select range of top notch fare; replaced by a far more extensive but inferior collection of stuff you would expect to find in any run off the mill supermarket. And, horror upon horror, they now also stock popular brands. They even sell date expired items at a reduced price. My God, one could be forgiven for thinking one had wandered into Asda.
Now, as I bemoan the lost salad days of M&S, the only straw of hope left to clutch at is that, if the saints do one day go marching in, St. Michael will be leading them.
I remember tripping over the first step and then a few bumps and thumps, and the next thing I knew, I was laid out at the top of the stairs, wondering what happened. Things like this don’t usually happen so I knew I had been involved in a very out of the ordinary event.
A miracle was my first thought but I soon dismissed that on the grounds of not being able to find any meaning in the occurrence. God uses miracles to convey a message of some sort to mankind and I really don’t think it’s his style to communicate in this fashion. Besides, what on earth could he be trying to tell us by unexpectedly propelling me upstairs.
After eliminating all other possible explanations, of which there were very few, I was left with the only plausible answer: A phenomenon, I had been the subject of a phenomenon. Phenomena come in various degrees of inexplicability and on a scale of one to ten I would rate this one at about five.
I never mentioned my experience to anyone as I don’t like being laughed at, but then I started to wonder how many other people have kept quiet about such incidents. Maybe phenomena are going off all over the place and people are too embarrassed to talk about it, I can’t see why it would just be me.
The reason I have now decided to share my own phenomenon is that, by doing so, perhaps it will prompt others to do the same. I hope so because I don’t much like the thought that I’ve been singled out, for some reason. Are there any other phenomenon victims out there?
I was thinking how much better life is these days compared with when I was younger. Things that used to be mildly pleasing are now awesome , and things that I once couldn’t even be sure warranted the slight raising of an eyebrow have become amazing. In the 70s it took something like a star man waiting in the sky to blow our minds; nowadays a bit of extra chocolate dust on top of frothy coffee is enough to do it. Then, just as now, people lusted after the finer things in life, such as expensive cars and houses, but unlike now the cars and houses back then weren’t worth dying for. Going even further back to my parents’ generation, to OMG was merely to invoke thoughts of one’s giddy aunt, now, no less than God would be adequate to express the sentiment.
My youngest granddaughter starts junior school in September and my daughter was saying how sad it was to see her leave the infants. I suppose watching your kids’ progression through school is a reminder of how quickly they are growing up. Our conversation made me think of my infant school and how I can barely remember being there. In fact, there are only three specific events that I can actually remember from infant school, and absolutely nothing else.
The first, I seem to think, happened quite soon after I very first started. During the morning we had a short break, when we were allowed to eat a sweet. We had to provide our own sweets and weren’t allowed to eat them in class at any other time. One particular day, the girl at the next desk to mine had placed her sweet on her desk and then wandered off for some reason. Back then my self control must have been even poorer than it is now because I remember grabbing the sweet and eating it. I also remember vigorously denying doing it when, on returning to her desk and putting two and two together, the girl ran off and returned with the teacher. I know the teacher didn’t accept my protests of innocence and I know I got into trouble, but I can’t remember the actual consequences. I’m pretty sure some kind of punishment was the outcome.
Event two also involved punishment of a kind, and it was a punishment that would have perfectly fitted my crime had I committed one. Again, at some time during the morning, every member of the class was given a small bottle of milk and a straw, and for a few minutes we all sat quietly drinking our milk. On this particular morning I finished drinking my milk and returned the bottle to the crate from whence it came, just like I did every other morning. But, unlike every other morning, shortly after putting my bottle back in the crate I was confronted by the teacher, who was accompanied by one of the girls. I don’t think it was the girl from the sweet incident but it would explain what happened if it was. It turned out the girl had gone and told the teacher that I had put my bottle back in the crate without finishing all the milk, which, apparently, must have been considered a very serious matter. I was severely told off for wastefulness and told to retrieve my discarded bottle from the crate and finish drinking the milk. On going through the bottles in the crate it transpired that at least half of them contained a small amount of milk. To be fair to the teacher, she did leave it to me to decide which had been my bottle, but in reality, I didn’t have any more idea of which one had been mine than she did. I remember retching as I sucked the -by now- room temperature milk through a straw that had almost certainly been previously sucked through by someone other than me. I still wonder to this day why all the other not quite empty bottles were of no apparent concern to the teacher.
When I was seven I broke my wrist and had to have a plaster cast on my arm. Apart from seeing it as an inconvenience I must also have seen its potential as a weapon because I remember clobbering a classmate on the side of the head with it. She ran, crying, back into school to tell the teacher, and I ran, scarpering, out of the school yard. Inevitably, when I went into school the next day I reaped what I had sown the day before, but I can’t remember the exact nature of the harvest.
I don’t know if anyone has noticed that a common element to all three unfortunate events was the presence of a girl. Just sayin.
My soul mate never phones me at work; but she will always answer when I phone her from work wanting to moan about how my day is going. She never tries to start a conversation when I am preoccupied with something else,
no matter how trivial my preoccupation is. My soul mate’s preoccupations are never too important to put on hold. When the shopping needs doing my soul mate just does it, or I just do it; we don’t do it together.
My soul mate realises that sex is the last thing on the mind of a man who has just had sex; I realise it is uppermost in the mind of a woman who has just had it. Miraculously, we manage to make this not a problem. Proper soul mates know that beds are only for sleeping in, except when they aren’t only for sleeping in. Most beds seem to be designed for not only being slept in on Saturday or Sunday morning, for some reason.
A soul mate doesn’t have a problem with a man not being unnecessarily emotional, and would never draw attention to the inconsistency of him giving an involuntary gulp at a mawkishly over sentimental scene in a mushy movie. She is also a better actor than the ones in the movie when it comes to pretending to believe he is only watching it for her sake.
Soul mates can witness a man commit the most incompetent of driving mistakes yet still fly of into a rant about the stupidity of the other driver, while at the same time feigning obliviousness towards the real culprit’s rapidly reddening face. Soul mates instinctively know that when you put up a shelf and it falls down, it is the wall’s fault.
If I ever do come across my soul mate, I hope for her sake that my conscience will prevent me from telling her who she is.
The original words that were translated, interpreted and then compiled into what has come to be known as the Bible, were written by men. I don’t think that is in dispute. Things only start to become contentious when it is claimed that these men were simply taking down dictation from God; or at least that is what I understand is being claimed by the people who describe the Bible as the word of God. Just how reliable can we take these ancient scribes to be? How can we be sure they weren’t just making it all up?.
When we don’t even seem to be able to trust the information coming to us hot off the press, informing us about current events as they are happening, how much faith can justifiably be put in stuff that was reported hundreds of years ago.
God may well be up there in his Heaven, who knows? It’s not for me to say he isn’t. It just strikes me as questionable that an awful lot of people are willing to accept an archaic collection of words, written by rather primitive people, as the manufactures manual on the way the Human Race should conduct itself on planet Earth.
I only say this in response to the current onslaught of apocalyptic warnings we are experiencing. I don’t particularly want to question anyone’s beliefs but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to raise the issue when people are continually trying to interfere with mine.
There is a noticeable similarity between the religiously motivated posts here and a lot of the political ones. Both lots could be described as having a very conservative, right wing leaning, and both also seem to stretch plausibility to breaking point and beyond. The resemblance of these two groups to each other is so striking as to make it pretty evident that they are part and parcel of the same underlying movement. Either one is worrying enough but both together is alarming.
I don’t know if it is inevitable that an extreme Christian Fundamentalist is also automatically a disturbingly fanatical Republican but it is very difficult to deny a very strong connection between the two. Religious extremism has probably been around much longer than its political equivalent so it seems logical to think that the sickeningly familiar tactics of the political dogmatists have been appropriated from the religious ones. They are basically the same.
The main method of persuasion used by the followers of these sinister ideologies seems to be based on demonisation, with an emphasis on the awful consequences of not seeing things their way. The Christians have a ready made nemesis in Satan, but the Republicans have to keep recreating theirs in order to move along with the times, although they usually have several on the go at once. Obama has been described as the Antichrist and Hilary Clinton is, apparently, the personification of evil, itself.
Would anyone who is not already affiliated to the Christian, Republican, raving bigot faction actually contemplate joining them? It would be nice to think not but in reality there always seems to be a ready supply of witless minions looking for a cause to follow.
History does have a habit of going round in circles and one can only hope that, as the wheel turns, this worrying state of affairs will be replaced by something more palatable, I certainly hope so, and as soon as possible.
A friend texted me a recipe not long ago and I wasted half a day scouring the shops for an ovenproof fish. By the time I realised it was a mistake I had lost my appetite.
It's a good job I think the world of the friend in question.
I had a pizza tonight, I ate it all but for one slice. At the moment, that slice is on a plate on the worktop (counter, in American), waiting to be put into the fridge. On the floor, next to my pedal bin, is the box that the pizza came in, waiting for me to take it out to the rubbish bin, which I will do at some point this evening. I know from experience that I won't eat that left over slice of pizza because I don't like it the day after and never do eat it. Despite knowing that I may as well put the leftover pizza back into the box and dispose of them both together, I will still put the pizza in the fridge, take the box out to the rubbish bin tonight and then take the pizza out to the rubbish bin tomorrow. I seem to be powerless in deviating from this sequence of events even though common sense tells me the logical course to take. All this makes me wonder what other things may have held me back in life for the want of doing what makes sense at the time.
There’s a set of people here who all seem to have the same strongly held opinions on the same set of issues. Guns, Muslims, Trump, Hillary Clinton, abortion, to name a few favourites. It’s not like some of their views happen to coincide, but rather, they all seem to think the same about everything. Another thing all these people seem to have in common is their propensity for posting videos, and something a lot of these videos have in common is that they have “Fox News” written in the bottom left hand corner. Well I’m no genius but I don’t need to be one to put two and two together.
Half an hour spent looking at Fox News clips on Youtube doesn’t amount to extensive research, I admit that, but it is enough to make it obvious that Fox News is far more propaganda than news. I always thought the purpose of news programmes was to inform people of the facts, not to tell them what to think. I know we all have our prejudices and preferences and like to be told what we prefer to hear, but what is the point of news if it’s biased? We all get things wrong sometimes but if we are never presented with an impartial account of what is going on, how are we supposed to make an informed decision when we vote?
I find the idea of people preferring having their prejudices reinforced, to hearing the truth, amazing.
The main choices seem to be:
1 The imminent showdown between God and Satan will bring forth a medley of unnatural disasters, the like of which we can hardly imagine.
2 The entire World is soon to be taken over by fanatical Muslims.
3 The Illuminati, to the soundtrack of Beyoncé and Madonna, are going to take control of our minds and enslave us in their New World Order.
Not to mention all the lesser tragedies we keep being warned about in these forums and blogs that are coming our way.
What on Earth is to become of us?
Apparently, just before the World ends, we are all going to get sucked off. Stringman kept quiet about that.
Harbal Blog (115)