I'll see you in a receptacle where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored, motherfucker

This account of metaphysical bureacracy and the defeat of Satan Himself in the highest court of English law is sourced from 'The New Harrowing of Hell' chapter from Derek Jarrett's The Sleep of Reason.

According to Anglican doctrine, hell froze over in 1864 and the Devil lost his groove in 1876. A couple of court cases did the trick, one of them featuring a priest who'd been a bit too nice in his thinking, and another featuring a man who wanted to take Communion despite his lack of belief in the Devil.

It started in a sense with Charles Darwin, or rather with geology and the necessity of acknowledging that the world was rather older than the Bible suggested. Essays and Reviews was published some time thereafter and went a ways to reconciling Christian faith with the new discoveries, but in a way many people thought was heretical. And the objections to it weren't all about the new science; some were about a new compassion.

For example, Henry Bristow Wilson, one of the contributing priests, had offered what Jarrett calls the 'kindly and comparatively harmless suggestion' that, rather than counting on the existence of Hell and eternal damnation for the naughty, '"we must entertain the hope that there shall be found, after the great adjucation, receptacles where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored."' A less kindly church court found Wilson guilty of heterodoxy for the suggestion.

However, Wilson appealed to the secular Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (something like the Supreme Court) and was cleared, partly on the basis of the committee's finding that eternal punishment was not part of the teachings of the Church of England. "He dismissed Hell with costs, and took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of eternal damnation," snarked the Spectator of the lead judge.

The reaction of the Anglican clerical heirarchy was furious, and following a synod and lots of rough talk the Convocation sent out a letter to all the priests in the land explaining that they really, definitely believed in hell and instructing them to sign a statement to that effect.

But Hell officially ceased to exist as a definite Anglican reality in the House of Lords on Friday July 15 1864 when Lord Houghton, esrtwhile suitor of Florence Nightingale and prodiguous pornography collector, pressed the issue by asking if the Convocation had had the right to send out a letter about how they all believed hell really, definitely existed and telling priests to sign it, whereupon the Lord Chancellor (head of the British judiciary until 2005) bitched that the Convocation was a futile, ridiculous body that had been suspended for its troublesomeness for a century and would be suspended again if it persisted in its hell-raising ways.

And the Anglican Church, whose highest echelon of authority is the political class, had to listen. State religion, baby; making the secular rulers of England the spiritual rulers as well was good for something besides letting Henry VIII stick his dick in Anne Boleyn with a clear conscience. Of course many Anglicans, lay and clerk, continued to insist hell was real and the world was heading there in a handbasket, but the dogmatic tide was against them.

In 1876 the Privy Council overturned another church council decision supporting a priest who had refused one Henry Jenkins communion on the basis of Jenkin's disbelief in the Devil, on the basis that belief in the Devil was not part of Anglican doctrine. The Devil - at least as far as Anglicans are concerned - disappeared in a puff of legal papers, with the unfortunate side effect that just under 120 years later Kevin Spacey managed to convince a generation of movie-goers he could act really well by delivering the line 'the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist' in the Usual Suspects.

Of course popular perceptions took much longer to change, with priests and parents continuing to use images of hell and the Devil to scare the fucking bejeebus out of their charges for decades and decades to come. But here we are some 150 years later, and Anglicans are finally complete fucking milksops about that sort of shit, and power to them.

So if all it took was a couple of court cases and a century and a half to get Anglicans to shut the fuck up about hell and the Devil, I wonder how long it will take them to shut the fuck up about how they're not comfortable with the ordination of women.

The Red Dragon wants to keep it fucking simple

In our ongoing practice and experimentation preceding a planned serious hippy-out in eleven months, we've gone four fifths of the way to deciding that we're going to try to live without an electric washing machine. Or the laundrette. Or dirty clothes. Or nudism. Instead we're getting a Wonder Wash and a spin dryer. I'd like to tell you it's because of our desire to live a greener lifestyle or some such shit, but of course you know me too well (erm, how many long haul flights have I been on in Q3 2009? I think it was six but I may have forgotten about a couple already . . . and how many will I be taking annually after moving to the Dustbowl Down Under? I'd have to plant the fucking Amazon to make up for that shit) and the truth is that when our washing machine died a couple of weeks ago, so did my fucking patience. I'm fucking tired of dealing with a kajillion household items I don't fucking understand so that when they fucking die I have to call some fucking cunt to come fix it for some fucking extortionate price.

Also we're leaving Brussels in eleven months, as noted above, and I don't feel like sinking another €150 into another used unit (even though €150 is quite a bit less than €450, which is what the new washing machines start at here) if there's a possibility I can just sink €50 into a Wonder Wash and a used spin dryer for largely the same results.

Finally I want to check into the Vatican's assertion that the washing machine was a greater boon for the women's liberation movement than the birth control pill. God knows, personally speaking, I'm no great fan of the pill, but God also knows I'm no great fucking fan of the Vatican, so I have to do some personal experimentation before believing the shit that it comes out with. There's a slight problem in our household, ergo est the man does most of the laundry here, but I can ask him how liberated, or not, he feels with the new eqipment and try to run some hypothetical models to see how liberated, or not, a woman would feel in his place.

Sewing up the Christan empire

I don't think I mentioned, but I have more than one resolution going at the moment. Awhile ago I decided that since my office is casual and since I'd managed to find a pair of jeans that won't give me a yeast infection and since I had quite a large collection of socks and had learnt how to darn them in case of need, I would try to go for a full year without buying clothes. Instead, making anything I needed, in a sort of crash course in sewing. Three motives:

1. I'm cheap, and hordeing money like a troll these days

2. I hate clothes shopping. About nine years ago I lost a tonne of weight and suddenly everything fit, which turned shopping from an exercise in humiliation into an exercise in looking in mirrors and geeking on how cute I was. So for a few years shopping was a pleasure, an amusement, just about my favourite thing to do in an afternoon . . . but I'd say over the last three or four years - since I had that job in advertising and got convinced of the inescapable patsyness of Western consumers - almost all the charm has leaked away. I resent shopping now. I resent the processes by which the clothes were made, transported, and then marketed to me. I resent being the victim of the market-driven vagaries of fashion (witness the fucking calvary* I had to go through to get a fucking pair of jeans with no fucking spandex in them). Clothes shopping sucks.

3. There's no other way I'm going to learn to sew unless I go this sort of sink-or-swim route. I've looked for dressmaking classes here and while it's not been completely goose-egg they're all too far away for me to honestly believe I'll take the trouble to go out for lessons once a week. I can hardly drag my sorry ass up to the prison every Wednesday for our tai chi sessions and that's a three-minute walk.

Last weekend was FINALLY the diapers for some peeps in Canada who are fit to erupt their babies (in the mail, Lamie). This weekend I'll be starting on underwear. Underwear for the F-word first - he has a hankering for some silk boxers and I figure he deserves no less. And then another pair of pants and a shoulder bag for a friend who's visiting at the end of the month, whose Tuesday birthday I have forgotten until this very moment. Shit. Why are so many people born in the fucking springtime? A different pants pattern than the ones I've used so far. The F-word needs some walking-around pants and the patterns I've hitherto used are definitely pyjama pants.

*You know what's neat about Calvary, Golgotha, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that Constantine built on top of it? It's a reclaimed temple to Aphrodite, supposedly ferreted out as both Jesus's death and burial place by Constantine's mum, Helena, despite not being anywhere close to where Jesus could have died and been buried according to the Bible. Constantine, remember, is the Roman emperor under whose rule Christianity really kicked off its transformation from a revolutionary lifestyle religion to a political weapon in the struggle to maintain an oppressive and lucrative status quo, and his mum Helena, remember, was his fucking mum; you're not going to get a more useful saint than that when you're trying to establish a new state religion. It was only 10 emperors and 50 years later that Theodosius went wholesale on the suppression of the temples and their replacement with churches. We saw a rather transparently hilarious example of Theodosius's work on our vacation in Syracuse this Christmas - the city's cathedral, seemingly hastily vomited up all over the temple of Minerva:


I sometimes hear of the Christianization of the temples and sacred sites described as some sort of evidence against Christianity (Jeebus never existed! He's a rehabilitated Mithras! etc.) - a very silly, non-apropos argument against a faith-based religion wherein it really doesn't matter if there's no proof of the man's existence and no proof of where he was born, alive, and expiring; the perfectly legitimate Christian retort to arguments like that is it really doesn't matter; I have faith. I think this is what makes the recent noisy dialogues between the faithful and vocal atheists so fucking annoying: to one group faith is great and to another faith isn't anything, so they're arguing with completely seperate rationalities, from different emotional bases, with the end result that each looks like a blithering, incomprehensible idiot to the other.

But what I do feel the Christianization of the temples indicates is that the same standard of people who were willing to wield disproportionate influence over pagan behaviour and profit from it in a very visible and material sense were (and are) also willing to control and profit from Christians - in a way that has very little to do with Christian morality, as the original writings set it out. Christians should be more careful. There are disgusting atrocities, grotesque power structures leaching off their love of God - gargoyles that they would probably find themselves too full of Christian love to support if they had a good grasp of the situation.

Popery dopery doooo

So let's say you're born in Germany at a spectacularly bad time to be born in Germany, and you get forced to be in Hitler Youth because that's the law in those days. And then after a stint in Hitler Youth, you're forced into support corps for a military carrying out one of history's more obviously lamentable agendas, because that's the law in those days. And then after the war you become a priest, and life goes on, and one day you want to be pope. Should the sole condition of having participated in your country's genocidal war effort when refusal to do so could have meant your death at worst and your discomfort at best prevent you from being pope? No, right? Because that wouldn't be fair, right?

Wrong. Let's try another question. Let's say you're born at any time in history with a clitoris. After you do whatever else you do, you become a nun, and life goes on, and one day you want to be pope. Should the sole condition of having been born with a clitoris prevent you from being pope? YES! Because the Catholic Church is not about fair. And Ratzinger being pope even though, as a child, he didn't resist the murderous Nazi war machine even unto death is not about fair. The Catholic Church sets its own rules, and its rules are that women aren't allowed positions of authority, and former members of Hitler Youth are allowed to be pope. Don't like it? Heretic! Because the one thing you really, really need to be a Catholic and not a heretic is to respect the hierarchy of the church. At the moment that means respecting Ratzinger, and in general terms it means respecting the fact that women cannot lead or preach within the church.

Anyways, one group of people who Ratzinger is working himself into believing respect him are the Lefebvrists, otherwise known as the Society of Pius X. Since he has decided this, and started to convince himself their rebellion against the hierarchy of the church and rejection of Vatican II might not be as schismatic as all that, some of them are allowed to be Catholics again instead of just another bunch of racist traditionalist fruitcakes who dress in frocks and vote for extreme-right parties.

Now, is that mentalist Aryan Williamson a nutcase Holocaust denier? Yes, and now that the Merkel herself has raised a stink and everybody in the world is pissed off about it, the popists are doing something about his re-admittance. But that's not all. This group that the church is working itself into reintegrating into the hierarchy didn't feature Williamson as an adherent by accident. Did Lefebvrists attempt to shelter Paul Touvier, the fugitive from justice wanted for the hands-on murder of seven Jews, and who may have facilitated murder of many more? Yes. Did they express heartfelt nostalgia for the murderous Vichy regime, calling those who threw it over 'barbarians without faith or law'? Yes. Did they encourage their French adherents to vote for the ultra-right party headed up by Jean Marie Le Pen? Yes.

Are they a bunch of racist, fascist shitwads? Look, if it shelters, expresses and encourages like a bunch of racist, fascist shitwads, it's probably a bunch of racist, fascist shitwads. But you know what? Fine. Being Catholic isn't about not being a racist, fascist shitwad, it's about respecting the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and not consecrating bishops unless the pope tells you you can. And the pope, in the case of Williamson and some other Lefebvrist 'bishops', has decided to effectively give that permission 20 years retroactively. Because Ratzinger is magic. So . . . Welcome Back, Cracker.

Like it or not, that's the nature of Catholicism; it blows. I respect individual Catholics, particularly those who love the Church too much to abandon it to its own iniquities, and who struggle as they can to make it a kinder phenomenon; the massive outcry they've raised about Williamson has got a pope, for the first time in living memory, to admit he might have made a mistake about something.

But that's the thing, there's a limit, when you go beyond these smaller squabbles. Struggle too much with the Church on a more macro level – confront it with the dictates of your conscience in terms of, say, believing that women who are fit for it should be allowed to preach, that priests would be able to serve and understand the lay community better if they were allowed to openly lead loving and reproductive lives with the partner of their choice, that women should force their husbands to wear condoms if they've already got more mouths to feed than they can afford, or that being a racist, fascist shitwad should preclude someone from having a position of authority in your church – and suddenly you're not quite Catholic anymore.

Silly geese

Almost through Oliver Twist. Nancy has been getting to me - she's got some good lines, that poor stupid girl in love with Bill Sikes. What a delicate sort of game Charles Dickens played to make such tales readable to a Victorian audience. But I have a feeling Victorian puritanism was more about snobbery than about prostletyzing, and it's fascinating to me his audience would have accepted the idea quite happily that a degraded, friendless girl like Nancy was living with her man with no thought of marriage one way or another in either of their heads.

This is part of what tickles me, if being punched in the gut can tickle, about the fuss over gay marriage. People act like marriage is this big, marvellous, ancient, romantic, spiritual institution that seperates us from the monkeys, and to a certain extent that's true, though it doesn't seperate us from the geese or the sleepy lizards. But all our ideas about it as Westerners are shaped by the Victorians, who were socially perverse enough to make Marx and Engels think that the world needed a Communist revolution because their workers' lives were so shitty, and socially perverse enough to put social pressure on every class to beggar themselves over a white-dress wedding . . .

When before, marriage (if you were lucky enough to not be Catholic and hence subject to a hocus-pocus sacrament, but Catholics have ignorance programmed into their fucking religion, so it neither surprises nor disappoints me they're so down on the gays - fuck them) had just been an announcement of exclusivity, a public promise that you would keep to one and only one partner as long as you both should live, but no farther - just to keep all the inheritance processes straight, all the sharing of resources within your own chromosomal pool, just like a fucking goose or sleepy lizard. Hence, it being okay for Dicken's Victorian readers if a man and a woman with zero-to-negative assets, like Bill and Nancy, were shacking up without dreaming of getting married.

Anyways, I do get the feeling deep down that's all marriage is, because love and emotional loyalty are things that exist in themselves, and no matter how homophobic someone is, they'll never be able to prevent gays from loving and being loyal to each other. So why people are thick enough to want to deny them some stupid fucking contract is absolutely beyond me, and why they imagine letting them have some stupid fucking contract would weaken the institution of the stupid fucking contract . . . ah, fuck it.

The Red Dragon values family

I seem to have stumbled into some sort of temporal vortex on Friday night whilst pissed and high because all of a sudden it's Monday morning. God, five day weeks make me want to shoot myself. What an arbitrary fucking number anyways - five. How about four? How about some family values cunt of a politician jumps up and down on his stupid fucking holy roller bandwagon and says 'I care so much about the sancticity of the family that I'm going to give everybody a three day weekend so they can spend more time together'? How about that, family values cunts? But noooo, I suppose it's much easier to make a stink about stopping the gays from getting some goddamn lame license and to make speeches on Father's Day. That's like the family-values-defending equivalent of making a noodlecard. GIVE US A THIRTY HOUR WEEK IF YOU WANT US TO MAKE PROPER CHILDREN. Fuck.

It was a good weekend though, fundamentally. If so. Fucking. Brief. And speaking of family values, at some point we watched Billy Elliot, which I hadn't seen before, and I thought it was very good indeed. I really liked the way the story rolled out over the disenfranchisement of the miners, and I liked the nasty harshness of Billy's family - and the realism of Billy unwittingly managing to bring his father around by catching him through dance at a very, very drunk moment. Rather than being simply a feel-good film, it was a terrific advertisement for the utility of slapping, punching and piss-ups in domestic relationships. I also liked that Billy was not simply a nice boy with a penchant for self-expression through dance. You could really see him becoming a proper primo ballet dancer - a real Nureyev type; passionate, punchy and possibly not so pleasant all the time.

Another good thing was finding out Comedy Central's website is now streaming full episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. That's nice. The F-word has a low tolerance for those shows, though. Too much shouting.

Jerusalem syndrome

"They attempt to reconcile Jews and Palestinians, speak to God and genuinely believe he answers them.” Hmm. Sounds like every American president for the last 50 years.

Joking, joking. I don't think they were really trying to reconcile the Jews and Palestinians at all. But seriously. Not to sound all Scientologist but sometimes I get a little freaked out when I reflect that if the Messiah did come, we'd certainly try to slap him or her (I'm banking on a her) in a mental ward. It's not crucifixion, certainly, but over-medication to the point of vegetation would be a rather more effective way to deal with her. No memorable martyrdom involved, no screaming at the sky about how her Dad should forgive her murderers because they don't fucking know what they're doing. Just some sort of firebrand transforming into a gently smiling lump. Gives me the willies . . . maybe I only think this because I'm slightly mad, but I think society needs a little madness to help people keep things in perspective.

Anyways, as far as Jerusalem Syndrome goes, I hope we can trust the doctors to tell the difference between faith-fuelled American yokel fatties who get too much sun and history and actual Messiah Candidates. It doesn't seem like such a difficult distinction to make, but who knows.

Speaking of madness, I am about to go all Al Pacino because tonight I am off to Stockholm to spend a little less than a week going around Sweden and Finland on a boozy press tour. The sun is out here in Brussels until after 10 and up ages before I am, even though my my internal clock wakes me at 6:30 every morning so I can make a nice café latte, blog, take care of my investments, stare out the window, think about funnies I want to Reclaim for the People (that is, rip off) from my business associates and conservative politicians (usually Boris Johnson; thank god the people of London were stupid enough to jettison that boring socialist mayor for a wise-cracking right-wing drunk), and generally ease myself into the day. So there I don't expect to see dark.

And with any luck at all I won't even have to look at a computer until next Wednesday, so I'll bid you all a happy week and leave you with Nick Cave's take on Messiah Wards.

Tweedle-dee, Tweedle-dum, and Tweedle-doesn't-eat-quite-as-much-shit

Having suggested Obama was vanilla yesterday, today I have to point out that he's still the least repulsive candidate by a long stretch. This was driven home to me last night when we watched the latest Four Corners (an Australian documentary series that I'm using to acclimatize myself to the culture of the country that may be my home someday, as I don't have access to a barbeque or a visible native underclass in Brussels - the Wallonians look just like me). It was quite a crap episode and didn't help me acclimatize to Australia at all as far as I can tell, but there was one moment in it that was fucking beautiful. Let me see if I can find it on YouTube because it was just so good:



What a little shit-eating fuck. What is it with the States that the politicians have to be such shit-eaters? Why can't a right-wing candidate say 'I didn't want any more national holidays because I think they're a waste of money, no matter how marvellous Such-and-Such was, and the black vote wasn't that important in my constituency at the time so, well, there you are', and either be congratulated or criticized for that decision? Why can't that awful creature Clinton say 'okay, that Bosnia thing was kind of a lie, but it sounded good, didn't it? By the way, my husband really fucked that Balkan shit up. He fucked a lot of shit up. Really, putting that cigar in the intern was the least of his fuck-ups. I won't be such a doofus if you vote for me' instead of mis-use words like 'mis-spoke'? Both of those moves might have been mistakes, but they were mistakes that the mistakers probably consulted their advisors about making - there were reasons those 'mistakes' were made - and eating shit in public will not help deal with those reasons.

And in the context of campaigning alongside two champion shit-eaters, Obama looks least worst. His speech after people first noticed his pastor was black and pissed off was not a shit-eating speech. And if his own pastor is now willing to sabotage his candidacy mid-campaign by stoking up the scandal over being black and pissed off - especially by saying he's pretty sure Obama secretly agrees with his thoughts on being black and pissed off, which is tantamount to calling him a liar - maybe I'd drop him too. But then, if I'm anything I'm a Quaker, and we don't have inconvenient, self-aggrandizing, book-selling, collection-plate passing, and in my experience insufferable creatures like pastors. There's a time and a place for mouthing off like a know-it-all madman, and it's called the Internet.

God damn America! God save the Queen!

As a born and bred Canada who has given up her residency and lives as an Official Expatriate in a ridiculous country she strives to ignore, it's not often I get sent a massive 'fuck you' from a government I can call my own. It is inevitable, however. For besides being Canadian I am also, thanks to the fine bloodlines of my mummy, Anglo-Saxon nationalism, and the bounty of Cold Queen Bess, officially one of the Inselaffen, who are told to fuck themselves by their government with a tedious regularity.

While I have a certain love for that green and pleasant land, I have an overwhelming disgust for its political system. Perhaps it's the most bullshitty one in the world - it's right up there, anyways. I still sort believe some people involved in the American one believe their own bullshit on some level. Though less and less so, particularly this morning. I don't understand how that country can be at a point where it has a serious black presidential candidate, but where the political system apparently requires him to be so deeply vanilla that he has to disown Jeremiah Wright because of some fairly mainstream pulpit-thumping.

And how can that pulpit-thumping be so deeply villified without being addressed? Forget about whether he was right or wrong about lots of the naughty things he said - the thing is, lots of people believe the naughty things he said. Saying them got more people into his church, I don't doubt. How can such ideas just be dismissed by a democratic political system in the height of the race for top office? How did those people get to be such pussies that the ones who disagree won't even calmly explain why they disagree instead of freaking the fuck out over the idea that some brown and black people at home and abroad are seriously fucked off by what the United States did and continues to do with them?

Though it was the height of temerity to tell God to damn America. That's the problem with these weirdo religious types - always telling their omnipotent lord what to do. I don't get that at all, you know. If he's omnipotent and perfect why the fuck are your prayers coming out as imperatives? Sit back and enjoy the ride, I say, and God will no doubt damn who He damn well pleases without being ordered around by one of His lesser creations.

Anyhoo, all I meant to do this morning was complain about the bullshitty tone of this response to a petition I signed a few months ago regarding the shutdown of the UK passport office in Brussels, but now I'm just happy I'm not American. A sentiment which the UK and Canadian political institutions have depended on for decades in terms of getting us to put up with their own brands of bullshit. "My eyeballs don't count under national health coverage anymore? Oh well, at least I'm not American." Et cetera.

Oh well, fuck you too, Cold Queen Bess.

Have you seen the little piggies?

I reckon I'm a closeted fur-monger, because despite being a pinko I totally do not get people fussing over other people wearing cute animals. And I write this as a cat lover who would enthusiastically disembowel any Swiss fuck who tried to get my Lexie for a blanket. The thing is, if Lexie was a piggie, I'd be just as enthusiastic about eviscerating any Italian fuck who tried to turn her into salame, because I'd love her no matter how big and fat and delicious she was. I feel there's something much worse about habitually eating meat twice a day than having a couple of fur coats in the cupboard. And hence, there's something proportionately more retarded about getting knickers in a twist over stray cats being strangled for their pelt or baby seals getting their heads bashed in than over kabillions of piggies being slaughtered in revolting abattoirs after consuming far too many primary food resources that could have gone to stopping Haitians and such from rioting over their hunger.

I'm not saying I'm going to rush out and buy a fur coat after I make my first €100,000, because unless you live in a cold country they're Bad Taste, and baby, I taste like fucking candy bars. But I'm so fucking sick of animal rights activists basing their compassion on cuteness. They need to face it: the cuter an animal is, the cuter it's going to look as a coat. Maybe they think it'd be easier to whip the world up into a big orgy of caring about general animal welfare if they concentrate on the cute ones, but can anybody except another cute-lovin' animal rights activist take that sort of thing seriously when piggies - a much brighter, more sensitive, more affectionate, more intelligent, AND more unclean animal than baby seals or cats - are getting killed in their billions in slaughterhouse conditions that make getting your brains clubbed out on a chunk of ice or getting throttled in the Swiss countryside look like a sojourn in a thalasso spa?

I suspect it's also a question of money. I don't think anybody ever got rich clubbing baby seals or choking Swiss cats, but I think a lot of people have got rich from being assholes to pigs. And I don't think the shriller animal rights activists have the guts, brains, or resources to focus their sights on that sort of industry, no matter how engaging pigs are (really, they have lovely personalities, and they're sooooo cute when they're babies) and no matter how popular Charlotte's Web was. So PETA does fucking wet, retarded, alienating, things like get shirty with famous people over their dogs, a bully like Heather Mills tries to tackle a cottage industry in an economically depressed shithole by posing with seals, and a fucking flake like Brigitte Bardot does a number on Swiss entrepreneurs. Good god, what a bunch of attention-grabbing wets.

The chemical dragon rides again

An encounter a little while ago saw more slap than tickle, with the consequence that we had a latex wardrobe malfunction and I was forced to seek out emergency contraception. But Belgium isn't France; it's much more Catholic, and consequently they don't throw around la pillule de lendemain in such a confetti-like fashion here. After an hour of fevered searching on Sunday morning I was left with the unfocused impression that I'd need to go to a family planning clinic that wouldn't be open until Monday to get it; after another ten minutes of even more fevered searching I got the impression I could get what I needed from a special Sunday pharmacy, and I did. The experience leaves me with three things that really must be said:

1. I try to be open to the message of the pro-life movement, as I know that for many of them it's from the heart, but any campaigner of any category who is campaigning against access to the morning-after pill is a twat. The action of the morning-after pill is a contraceptive action, not an abortive action. It jellifies the works up there so that wee sperms cannot go anywhere or so that a fertilized egg cannot fix itself in the walls of the uterus and start sucking sustenance from the mother's body.

I understand that there's a big group of people who feel life starts once a wee tadpole from the daddy swims into a big beachball from the mummy. Well, they're fucking wrong. Life starts ages before that. The wee tadpole is alive and the big beachball is alive, and the action of the tadpole swimming into the beachball is a part of both their lifecycles. Things really get interesting when the beachball that got swum into by a tadpole lodges itself in the uterine wall of the mummy and starts sucking sustenance from her. Up until that point, however, it's just another short-lived cell in a body full of short-lived cells.

And I understand there's also a big group of people who are against contraception, and to half of them, I say: Catholics, let it go. You might be able to get your adherents to have big families, but you're just going to lose them to the Pentecostals anyways. They have childcare and singing, and all you have is guilt and gloomy rituals.

2. The morning after pill is a fucking bitch. I've heard that you can get the same effect, in a pinch, by swallowing 20 birth control pills at once, and it fucking feels like it. I hate the pill because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess, and I hate the morning-after pill even more because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess days after the fact, when it's not a reflex to make a connection between the sensation that the world is a torture chamber and the fact that six or seven days ago you ingested an elephant's dose of sex hormones. I didn't notice the effect so much before, because the last time I needed the morning after pill was when I was with Bluebeard, when I was a raging, weeping mess all the time. But now that life is fundamentally good and I'm generally in a chirpy mood, it's been nigh-on unbearable.

3. Belgium is a fucking pain in my ass. It's the national equivalent of a teenage boy's bedroom. Getting anything done here takes so long, like, Italy-long, without Italy-weather or Italy-food or Italy-beauty. Having a panic as I thought I was due for an ectopic pregnancy through waiting too long to take the morning after pill because the centralization of information is an absolutely unknown concept here isn't even the most recent example of Belgium pissing me off. There has also been the fun of trying to get my residency card, trying to change debit accounts for my fuckin' useless health insurance, trying to go outside without choking on the visibly unhealthy air, trying to cross streets without getting hit by cars, and trying to stroll down pavements in a country where apparently people don't know how to walk.

Today's lesson is all about the corruption of the religious class

So Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a nice album even if the title is a little twee. But one of the things I like about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds besides what I gushed about on Hipster's blog is their ability to communicate exclamation marks through music, so it's not so twee as all that. It's loud and lacking the cutesy prettiness of the last Bad Seeds album that had tinkly little tracks like 'Breathless' and 'Messiah Ward', but that's okay. It has its own, louder, prettiness. Especially the second track, which is still my favourite song.

Something I like to think about from time to time when I'm stuck on public transport without a book is old-time itinerant preachers and charismatics, who'd go around selling their particular version of God in barns and street corners and speaker's corners and whatnot, building up or failing to build up a following. Especially this guy, mostly because I can hardly wrap my head around the idea of German glossolalia. Can you imagine?

Since watching Jesus Camp I haven't been able to believe modern North American charismatic or pentecostal denominations have a relationship with the divine - that their religion isn't just a travesty that serves the lay people as a socially acceptable excuse to hate gays, gainfully employed women, and scientists, and serves the preachers as a way to make enough money to buy crystal meth for their favourite manwhores whilst maintaining a large family in the style to which they've become accustomed. At the time I found the movie annoying and unedifying, but what made the price of admission worth it was seeing those children educated in the art of faking glossolalia. Exactly the sort of thing that's going to make the rest of the world think they're loony, and make them feel a strong sense of community with each other. Seeing the camp director slipping in and out of glossolalia whilst pumping everybody up was pretty amazing.

I want to think that glossolalia is an actual spontaneous phenomenon - not literally that one starts spouting off in the tongue of angels, but that one manages to have an experience of such mysticism, such abandonment of the self . . . As it stands for me the Quaker way is best: shutting up for a solid hour and only speaking (with words) when you feel moved to - second last meeting I went to, one of the speakers recited from one of Leonard Cohen's more cheerful songs - maybe that's as angel-talky as it gets these days.

Anyways, I still like to imagine that my culture used to support real honest-to-goodness mystics and angel-talk and all the other fancypants pentecostal stuff in the past, when there was less money to be made off it and people didn't know enough about the wider world to be quite so scared shitless by it - that maybe there was a time when North American mystic religion was actually about religion, and not paranoia. I like to imagine it but I doubt it. A lot.

The point I was getting at is that Nick Cave and Tom Waits are two people I think would have made fantastic itinerant preachers or charismatics back in the day. If I had seen them proselytizing back in, say, 1850, and had been raised over the preceding 29 years, I probably would have joined their cults. It's a strange thought but I'm pretty sure that's what would have happened.