Living for Disco

Julia, our receptionist, walks into my office, and says the same thing she always says - pointlessly, because the answer does not matter one jot.

“Rachael, are you busy?”

“Er…”, I look at my screen, which is probably showing my email, or a blog, or occasionally the google home page, for when I am struck with an urgent need to know something obscure, like “contents tartare sauce”, or “dream of corpses significance”.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

“I don’t know. What’s up?”

“My friend had a dream last night when she had shit all over her hands”. She extends her hands to me as if to demonstrate where the shit was. “What does it mean?”

I’m stumped. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“No, it’s ok, I’m looking it up on the internet. But how do you spell shit? Is it s h i t?”

I pause, trying to work out whether she’s likely to find a dream interpretation website that uses the word ’shit’, and wonder whether to tell her to use an alternative, like ‘faeces’ or ‘excrement’, and decide against it.

“Yes” I reply. Succinct, if nothing else, that’s me.

She wanders off, wiping her hands absentmindedly on her skirt.

************

Some kind visitors from South Africa brought a copy of The Express international edition into the office. I fucking hate the tabloids, but it was a joy to see a British newspaper, even if it is crap. I leave it lying on my desk and Kennedy walks in and absentmindedly starts to leaf through it.

“Wow, that palace is big”, he says, showing me a picture of Buckingham Palace. “Where is that palace? Is it in Liverpool?”

I stare at him, confused. “Nooo, I don’t believe it’s in Liverpool,” I reply.

“But the Queen, she is from Liverpool, isn’t it?”

“Er, no. No, the queen isn’t from Liverpool.” I’m trying not to laugh, even though there is no earthly reason why he would know where the queen is from.

“But she supports Liverpool in the football.”

“Does she? I didn’t know that.” I’m struck with a mental image of our monarch sat in front of the TV in a Liverpool shirt with a can of Heineken, shouting “You’ll never walk alone” at the TV, while Prince Philip plays keepy uppy in the corner.

“So where is this palace? Do you have one in every city?”

“It’s in London. No, there’s just that one. And a castle in Windsor. I think that’s it.”

He goes back to the paper, looking thoughtful.

**************

I don’t usually do memes, as I have said before. However, this one is in aid of Clare, who is stuck in the Big Blogger house, and needs votes. Mind you, so does my other incarcerated friend Papersurfer. So, go vote. For someone.

(1) Tell your readers three things about you that would make you the Ideal Housemate if you were imprisoned in a house with ten random strangers for weeks on end. Then three things that’d make you the Housemate From Hell.

(3) Tag as many people as possible with this meme. Quickly! The voting ends at midday on Mon 2nd July!

OK. Why would I make the perfect housemate? Well:

1. I have a history of sharing accomodation with complete lunatics. I’m serious. I know there’s a rule that says if there’s three or more of you in a house, and you think no-one is weird, or nuts, or scary, then the weird/nuts/scary one is you. However, that’s never happened to me. This means that if you live in a house with me, not only will you have a shining example of how to be normal, but you’ll never be bored, because I am a magnet for freaks.

2. I always make sure that number 2s are fully flushed before leaving the bathroom.

3. I am excellent at sharing bottles of wine with people. Therefore anyone sharing a house with me will always have a convivial, erudite and witty drinking companion for those post breakfast lulls in conversation.

And as for my faults, there are but few. However, if I dig really hard, I can tell you that:

1. Darlings, I live alone. Anyone else occupying my space does so on the proviso that they become a slave to my whims.

2. I refuse to eat anything that has mayonnaise in it, or near it. I am usually fairly dramatic about this (convulsions, retching, turning blue), and this could put other people off their food.

3. All chocolate in the house is mine. Mine. Do you hear me? I’ll defend it with my life, and I have very sharp nails.

So, anyone else want to answer these questions? Please feel free to be tagged.

There is a big party going on in my head. The glitterati of the planet Blah have got all dressed up in their finery and are having a riot. When they have calmed down and gone away, I will be back. Until then, I’m off to find some nurofen.

A few things are making me a bit cross today. One of them I will write about tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d like to give this article a bit of a skewering. I don’t know why I’m bothering really, because he skewers himself quite nicely, with what is an outpouring of overblown, fantastically generalised, badly argued rhetoric, but I’m cross, so I will.

Apparently, according to Theo Hobson, ‘Atheism is pretentious in the sense of claiming…to know what belief in God entails, and what religion, in all its infinite variety, essentially is’. In addition to this all atheists fundamentally object to religion, and are on a mission to eradicate it from the face of the earth. He is taking as his example Christpher Hitchens, who has just publisehd a book entitled “God is not great: How religion poisons everything”.

He makes these pronouncements, and then negates any reasonable argument (for example on the grounds that an atheist is godless, or denies the existence of god, and doesn’t necessarily conform to any ideology surrounding that denial) by saying, in essence “Well, atheists would say that”. That’s mature, Theo - I haven’t used that kind of argument since I was in primary school. Would you please explain to me why that makes me wrong, or why it vindicates your ignoranct generalisations?

He then goes on to say that atheism in itself is a faith. I actually don’t understand how he can have arrived at this conjecture. Just because Christopher Hitchens believes that standing up to dogma will encourage people to use their brains does not mean that all atheists have faith in the fact that this will make the world a better place. My personal beliefs are about a lack of faith in a God. If I agree with Hitchens, does that mean I take his book and those of all other atheist philosophers as my bible? That I am therefore by default on some kind of anti-religious crusade? I don’t think so. I’ve been accused here before of laughing at people’s faith and of thinking it stupid. Perhaps to some extent I do, but people are entitled to believe what they want - although when it comes to things like honour killings and violence against abortion practitioners and faith-based conflicts I’ll hold my hands up and say that I think this aspect is harmful. It’s not just atheists who think so.

And as for the feeble joke about ’sexual repression’, shame on you Theo. You should know better than that. Women have been repressed by the pronouncements laid down in religious texts for thousands of years. It happened. Accept it.

And finally, he says “I consider the atheist’s desire to generalise about religion to be a case of intellectual cowardice. The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty.” Oh bravo. I completely agree. Would you care to reread the what you just wrote? I know he says he’s talking about militant atheism, but it doesn’t sound that way to me.

It’s not religion that I have a bug bear with. It’s people like Theo who presume to tell me what I do or don’t believe, because believe me, they couldn’t be more wrong.

I spell my name with an extra ‘a’, as in Michael. Most people, however, spell it the standard way - Rachel. This annoys me, particularly in emails, because my name is my email address. How hard can it be just to raise your eyes a few millimetres and check? You typed the goddamn thing in after all. I know I’m being pedantic, but it’s my name, and I like it just fine the way it is.

However, what really annoys me, and it happens ALOT, believe me, is when I spell my name out and people still don’t get it.

The conversation usually goes something very similar to this:

“Can I email it to you?”

“Of course. My email address is rachael, that’s spelt r, a, c, h, a, e, l at [my organisation] .org.”

“OK, I will do that.”

Phone rings two minutes later.

“That email address you gave me, it is not working.”

I know already what the problem is, and I always find it difficult to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“How did you spell my name?”

“R, a, c, h, e, l”

“No, it’s a, e, l.”

“r, a, e, l?”

“No, that’s Rael. Rachael. With an a before the e.”

“R, a, c, h, e, a, l?

“No. A E L. A. E. L.”

“Ah, ok”.

Then I will usually get the email, because they’ve managed to retain the information for long enough to type in the address, but it will start off “Dear Miss Raecheal”, or “Dear Miss Rechal” or some such nonsense.

Over and over again, this happens. Do people not have ears? Do they not learn the alphabet? Why is it so difficult?

Gaaah.

I do not understand.