Category Archives: *Psychics/Religion*

Jamie Does… Psychics

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In this occasional series, Jamie Does…, I’ll be coming out of my mental, physical and spiritual comfort zones to take part in, learn about and experience all manner of lifestyles, rituals and activities. Pushing myself to my very limits; suffering in the pursuit of knowledge and self-growth; making myself look like a complete and utter bell-end. And hopefully making you bunch of sadists laugh along the way. This time: psychics. 

As I sit at my table waiting for the psychic floor-show to begin, I realise two things: one, that I’m cold – there’s a draught skipping and dancing over my exposed skin – and, two, that I can hear voices, chattering and insistent. Could it be that the dead are already with us, lowering the temperature with their ghostly presence, and whispering on the peripheries? Well, no. There’s a simpler explanation. I’m in a pub in Grangemouth, and the heating is broken. And it’s full of regulars, hence the whispering. Which is less like whispering, and more like hushed shouting. But not so hushed. Yeah, they’re pretty much just shouting. Sorry I lied to you, but I needed to make my ghost-themed intro work.

The only thing separating those of us, like me, who are here for the spirits from those who are here for, well, you know, the spirits, but the drinkable kind, is an invisible partition; that and some reserved signs selotaped to the backs of our seats. I have a good look around. Everything about this special, ticketed event screams ‘cheap’. I hope that doesn’t mean we’re going to get commensurately cheap ghosts and psychic advice. (“Your third-cousin’s former best friend’s grandpa’s brother is here, and he says that blue doesn’t really suit you in a shoe.”)

The firm behind tonight’s voyage into the great unknown is Second Sight, who’ve come to Grangemouth from Paisley, which is a little like travelling from Chernobyl to… well, a different part of Chernobyl. I have a chuckle at their slogan: ‘The Alternative Experience’. Alternative to what exactly? Their mantra’s as imprecise as their craft. Maybe they’re offering an alternative to experience itself? ‘Come join us for a night of formlessness that may or may not have happened that one day soon you won’t remember anyway.’

Every table receives a little slip of paper that can be used to book a private reading later in the night. I laugh again when I see the disclaimer on the slip: FOR RECREATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. Imagine if you read that phrase on the consent form for your bowel surgery. You’d evacuate immediately.

The pub I’m in used to be a church. Significantly more than half of its inhabitants are pissed. The environment seems sacrilegious enough as it is without angering God any further by attempting to commune with the dead. I wonder how cold it’ll be once the Almighty blows the roof off the place in a fit of Old Testament rage. It comes as something of a relief when I remember that God doesn’t exist. Or ghosts. Or psychic powers, for that matter.

Yes, folks, I’m a die-hard sceptic: an affirmed anti-religionist and pooh-pooher of the supernatural. I’ve no patience for folksy faith beliefs or witchy superstitions, which tend to have a deleterious effect upon common sense, the power of reason and a society’s ability to educate its young. I’ve always preferred to see the world through scientific safety specs rather than misted, mystical goggles. I can’t believe there are people out there credulous enough to believe not only that it’s possible to lay a twinkling fibre-optic cable across the cold canyon of death to have a wee blether with your dead granny, but also that the only people powerful enough to achieve this miraculous feat are retired dinner-ladies and mentally-ill hairdressers.

So what am I doing at a psychic floor-show, you may very well ask? That’s easy. I’m here to take the piss out of it. Here. In this very blog you’re reading now.

Where’s your inquisitive and open mind, Jamie? Ach, been there, done that, got the T-shirt (and the T-shirt says ‘I’m not doing that again, hence this T-shirt’). I’m with Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown, James Randi and almost every other sane-minded, rational thinker on this particular subject.

Still, just because I hold these beliefs in private and occasionally express my thoughts about it through the medium (forgive me) of this blog doesn’t mean that I have to be an absolute asshole to people who do believe these things when meeting them face-to-face. My politeness always over-rides my scorn. Well…

Almost always.

Tonight in this vast, cold space I’m surrounded on all sides by believers and ‘well-there-must-be-something-to-its’. Well, that’s what I believe, anyway. What a plot twist it would be if every single person here tonight, like me, was just here to take the piss. Anyway, I find myself reticent about revealing my true feelings to the rest of the guests, even under direct questioning. To which I’m soon subjected. A lively older woman sitting with her daughters at the table just to my right asks me outright if I’m a believer.

‘I’m a sceptic,’ I tell her, which is entirely true, ‘but I like to keep an open mind,’ I tell her, which is complete bullshit. At least where this stuff is concerned.

I ask her the same question in return. She admits to believing in ‘something’, but isn’t completely sold on psychics. Not all of them, anyway. Some are definitely better than others, she says. I ask her why she asked me about my beliefs, or lack thereof. Was I giving off sceptical vibes?

‘No,’ she says, ‘It’s just you don’t see many guys at things like these.’

She’s right. I’ve noticed the same. Audience and psychic alike are usually mostly female.

‘Why do you think it is that men don’t usually come to these things?’ I ask her.

‘I guess they don’t see it as a manly thing. Like all of this is women’s stuff.’

It’s an interesting perspective. I once talked with a professor of social psychology from Glasgow University about spiritualism, and asked him why he thought many more women than men believed in it. He thought that the impulse possibly stemmed from motherhood; that the ability to create life gave women stronger feelings about death, especially guilt and fear. A sincere belief in spiritualism and the afterlife can go some way towards rendering a mother’s anxieties moot. If all of this is real, then a woman isn’t bringing life into this world just to die. We all get to live forever.

The professor didn’t think it was a coincidence that spiritualism first took hold around the time of the First World War, when hundreds of millions of men – millions upon millions of sons – were sent to their deaths en masse in the most horrifying ways and conditions imaginable.

My deep and solemn thoughts are shattered by a sudden onslaught of music. The words boom out across the pub floor as an old man hobbles past my table on his way to the toilet for a shite: ‘YOU CAN DO MAGIC!’

We’re ready to begin.

The lead psychic takes to the stage. Well, to the floor. Stages are a bit too pretentious for Grangemouth. The psychic’s in late middle-age, and clinging fiercely to the last vestiges of her blondeness. Her accent’s a messy amalgamation of every single English regional accent ever uttered, past, present and future. I can detect a pinch of Scouse here; a dash of Ancient Saxon there; a sprinkling of Terry Tibbs from Fonejacker here. Mercifully, the Paisley brogue hasn’t rubbed off on her. ‘Bored’ and ‘angry’ isn’t a good tonal blend for a psychic to have.

Let’s call this lady Tibbs going forwards so we don’t get confused between her and the other lady. ‘Other’ singular. There are supposed to be three psychics here tonight, but Tibbs explains to us that the third fell ill, and had to pull out at the last minute. Those unforeseen circumstances are a bitch, right? I post this joke on Facebook, and someone on my feed asks me never to do this awful joke ever again. It’s hacky, yeah, but what can I do? It’s not really a joke. It happened.

Unfortunately, it’s the spiritualist medium portion of the triumvirate who’s sick, and if we’re all honest with ourselves – believer and sceptic alike – the medium’s the one we’re here to see. They’re the most entertaining and potentially hilarious of the bunch.

Instead we’ve got Tibbs and her tarot cards.

I’ve never understood the allure or indeed the point of Tarot; why it satisfies people so much. ‘Pick a card, any card, and I’ll stitch together a set of generic probabilities and parcel them up to you like a warning from some supernatural under-writer at a ghost insurance company.’ I could do Tarot, and I wouldn’t need any fancy schmancy cards, either. I’d just do it with a normal deck of playing cards.

‘Ah, the six of clubs. That’s an interesting one. It means you’re going to enjoy some lovely long walks on the beach, and maybe come into some money. Ah, joined by the nine of diamonds. Oooh, bad luck, your sister’s going to die. That’ll be forty quid, please.’

Stand-ups occasionally have to deal with hecklers: boorish loudmouths who think that their obnoxious, booze-fuelled banter is a boon for their act, and almost certainly a gift to comedy itself. This is the first time I’ve seen a heckler at a psychic night. There’s an older lady, big stern specks and shark-like eyes, and built like an angry ostrich, who’s loudly objecting to almost everything that happens.  Her mostly incomprehensible outbursts are accompanied by shushes from one of her two nieces who are sitting across the table from her. ‘Come oan, Aunty Mary!’ they keep saying, in an exasperated, though amused, tone.

Aunty Mary’s having none of it. Like a naughty child, each rebuke only fuels her mischief. If she isn’t downing and slamming pints, she’s laughing hysterically at nothing in particular, or barking out half-words like a dog with a brain injury. She turns around and shouts something at the old lady sitting at the table just in front of mine: ‘How dae ah ken you? Dae a ken you fae somewhere?’ The old lady just sort of shrugs, looking visibly grateful that she doesn’t actually ‘ken’ this cackling, pint-slamming she-beast.

Mary ups the ante: each time the psychic asks the audience for a round of applause, Mary spins around, pulls an angry face and gives her the fingers ‘behind her back’. I have to keep biting my lip. This shit is hilarious. But I really don’t want to catch Mary’s eye. Easier said than done because she keeps turning round to stare at me. It’s unnerving. Like being watched by a giant owl. I feel like I should’ve given my six pounds admission to her:  ‘An Audience with Aunty Mary and Friends: a night you won’t forget, an evening she’ll never remember.’

Meanwhile, Tibbs keeps calling up volunteers and shuffling out supernatural wisdom. She tells one young woman the cards want her to leave her boyfriend; she advises a middle-aged woman she’ll be going to a funeral in the next four months, and she pleads with a young man to sit down more often if he’s feeling tired. If the other side of the existential plane is this achingly dull, I’ll gladly choose oblivion over eternal life; even reincarnation into the body of a scrotal tick would be better. No wonder Mary keeps giving Tibbs the loco sign.

And no wonder Mary doesn’t come back after the first break. I’m devastated, but I can’t blame her.

I head to the bar for another coffee, and come back to my table to jot some things down in my notebook. The lady at the adjacent table, who earlier asked me about my beliefs, now asks if I’m a journalist. I tell her about my blog. I give her the URL and she taps it into her phone. She looks down, shakes her head and smiles. ‘You’re here to take the piss, aren’t you?’ I smile back and shrug.

Our next psychic powerhouse is played to the stage, with ‘THOSE HEALING HANDS!’ booming out across the half-empty pub. Everybody looks thoroughly underwhelmed as a plump, haggard and deeply fed-up old woman slowly staggers towards the microphone. She doesn’t exactly fit the song: a dying walrus crawling towards the stage to ‘Rage Against the Machine’ would somehow feel less incongruous. This lady looks like she’d be far more comfortable having a wee sit down, a cup of tea and an empire biscuit by a three-bar fire than embarking on an exhausting mental battle against the dead.

I look around and smile to myself. This could be bingo night at an Old Folk’s Home (it really could be – we’ve already been sold raffle tickets). I feel like I’m inside an episode of Phoenix Nights, but I’m the only one who realises how funny it is.

‘Hello,’ says the ‘psychic’ (and I don’t have inverted commas big enough to place around that word), and the energy in the room is so palpable you can almost feel it. Her laconic Paisley drawl has a soporific quality. I’m convinced that the dead are only drawn to this woman because they see her as a kindred spirit. It might be worth checking for a pulse, or calling an ambulance.

Or the Ghostbusters.

Suddenly, she’s got a bunch of coloured ribbons in her hand. I’ve never heard of coloured ribbons being used to commune with the spirit realm before. It seems pretty arbitrary. What next? A packet of boiled sweeties? A basket filled with dead octopi? A tub of grout with Smarties sprinkled over it?

One by one, audience members file up to the front, take a ribbon, and sit down again as Paisley Pat throws out some ghost-talk. ‘Who’s got the heart problem?’ ‘Have you decided where you’re aw goin’ fur Christmas Day?’ ‘Are you going on holiday next year?’ I start to wonder if this is a psychic floor show or a fucking haircut.

A group of guys of student age, and appearance, are sitting together at a table fifteen feet or so up the hall from me. One of them has long hair and a grungy T-shirt. Another looks like the kind of guy who enjoys speciality ales and long games of Dungeons and Dragons. The last one looks a little like Andrew Cuanan meets Chandler by way of Seth MacFarlane. When they first arrived in the pub I couldn’t work out if they were full-on believers or sarky sceptics like me. I thought the long-haired guy looked like he might be into druidic runes, or carving spells into his skin with a sharpened thigh-bone, but Chandler and his ale-drinking pal didn’t fit my half-arsed profile.

I watch Chandler now as he’s listening to the ribbon lady, and I see an unmistakable smirk work its way over his face, the same one I’ve been fighting to conceal almost the whole time I’ve been here. I see you, Chandler. It’s especially obvious when he volunteers, and has to fight a laugh as the psychic tells him that he’s got immense psychic powers, too, and he should go to his local spiritualist church, as there’s a message waiting for him there. BT Callminder from beyond the grave. That’s some service.

Before the second and final break, Tibbs come back to remind us to fill out a dream card and pop it up on the stage so she can interpret them for us in the final section. Because I’m unashamedly me, I can’t resist jotting down a dream heavily suggestive of sexual deviancy and mescaline. “I have a recurring dream,” I start to write, “that I’m being chased by a wolf with the face of a budgie that just keeps shouting ‘My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard’. My penis falls off and I wake up wet.”

I’m surprised at myself for keeping it so clean.

I go over to Chandler’s table as the break begins. I want to enlist the students’ help in coming up with lots of weird-ass dreams for Tibbs to interpret. I was right about Chandler. We share a laugh about some of the evening’s more ridiculous elements, i.e. every single moment of it.

The final section begins. The ribbon lady from Paisley is off in a side-booth giving private readings for £40-a-pop, the psychic equivalent of a lap-dancer. Tibbs is back in charge. She picks up a piece of paper, reads the dream to herself and laughs like a tittering schoolgirl.

‘I don’t think I can read this one out,’ she says, almost blushing. Good work, boys, I think to myself. You must have come up with a cracker there. Tibbs apologises for the filth that’s about to fall out of her mouth, then proceeds to read it aloud. ‘I have a dream,’ she says, ‘that I’m being attacked by butt plugs.’

You can almost picture Martin Luther King up there, can’t you?

I find out later that it wasn’t Chandler who wrote this one, but a bunch of women who were sitting next to him. Those heroes.

‘What does it mean?’ I shout, when Tibbs seems reluctant to delve.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘When you have a dream like this, it means that you’ve got something inside of you, maybe a thought or a feeling, that you’re trying to keep inside, that you don’t want to let out.’

‘But what if the person dreaming the dream is Elton John?’ I holler out from the back of the pub.

Chandler bursts out laughing. A few people snigger.

‘That would be an organic dream,’ replies Tibbs, matter-of-factly.

‘An orgasmic dream you mean!’ shouts the woman to my right. The place ripples with laughter.

This is what I came here for tonight. To be the bad boy up the back of the class, causing a rumpus and generating plenty of material.

Tibbs reads out my dream next, the one about wolves and willies and milkshakes. She tells me it means I’ve got trust issues. She’s right about that. After all, I just paid seven pounds to two old women because they said they could speak to the dead, and then spent three hours watching them shuffling cards, twanging ribbons and reading out bits of paper.

And do you know what? I’d do it all again. What a world. What a town.

Roosters and Religion: An Attack

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I’ve always considered myself a Jesus of the animals; or at the very least a cut-price Steve Irwin. I’ve got a special way with animals, a belief to which I stubbornly cling even though I once ended up with the beak of an African grey parrot crunched over my finger like a bear-trap, a painful occurrence that followed numerous warnings not to prod my finger into its cage. “It’s okay,” I remember saying, only seconds before. “Animals love me.”

I’m something of a mental case when it comes to our non-human friends. I like nothing better than to sit by the loch with seagulls perched on my head, and swans encircling me like long-necked disciples. I’ve never yet been able to walk past a dog without patting it, always holding out my hand to be sniffed like the Pope’s ring. When my eldest was two and dropped his favourite hat into the African boar enclosure at Edinburgh zoo, I was straight in there like a fleet-footed Doctor Doolittle to retrieve it, danger (and life-time ban from the zoo) be damned. If I was Noah, I would’ve had two arks.

Yes, I love all animals, except…

Well. Until recently, I’ve never had particularly strong feelings about roosters. Barely any feelings at all, truth be told, beyond the faint glimmer of recognition that accompanies the sight of a box of Kellogg’s’ Cornflakes or an old re-run of Foghorn Leghorn. I’ve never considered roosters to be particularly cuddly, but then neither have I considered them to be especially dangerous.

There’s a family who lives just off the main road on the outskirts of the next town over. They’re smallholders, with a little smattering of chickens, and a rooster to, well… rule the roost, I suppose, in a quite literal sense. Although the chickens have the run of the small public space next to their owners’ property, it’s not a stretch of land that anyone would ever pass through or arrive at if not specifically to come see the chickens, or visit the family. We’ve often stopped there with the kids. It’s nice to have a little oasis of nature on-hand among the urban squalor. The lady of the house once came out to say hello, and introduced my kids to her little grand-daughter, before letting them all feed the chickens together. Our two loved it.

Generic picture. Our two are boys, and we’d never be cruel enough to put them in dungarees

Earlier this spring I took my eldest, Jack, on a jaunt in the car. We were heading to the next town over to grab some lunch, walk by the shore, and visit a second-hand book-store for a re-up of kids’ stories. As it was a bright and sunny-ish day, I thought it would be nice to stop and say a quick how-do-you-cock-a-doodle-doo to the chickens.

We crossed the road and strolled up to the chickens, greeting them like they were old friends. The rooster, rather a big bugger as far as roosters go, came strutting over to us as we advanced up the grass, its head bopping up and down in a gesture that I interpreted as a nod of recognition – mano-a-chickano. The closest human translation is probably: ‘Alright mate?’ In any case, the rooster seemed unconcerned with our presence. It made past us and continued to strut about and peck at the ground.

At this point Jack’s ebullience got the better of him, as ebullience tends to do in four-year-olds. ‘Not so close, Jack,’ I chided him gently, as he skipped around the fringes of a flower-bed that housed a squad of squatting chickens. He skipped around a little more, and then made his way back towards me. He was less than fifteen feet away, and closing, when the rooster decided to re-announce itself.

It was coming towards us. Specifically, it was coming towards Jack. A little faster this time, but still with no obvious malicious intent. It’s hard to tell with a rooster. They don’t start belting out menacing renditions of football chants, or take to whipping out flick knives. Their angry strut is remarkably similar to their regular strut. If instead of a rooster it had been a bear, a dog, or even a parrot (shakes fist at the heavens) coming towards us I would’ve thrown myself in-front of Jack in the manner of a presidential bodyguard. I would’ve ran at it with the zeal of a star quarterback, or thrown Jack over my shoulders and rushed him towards the car like I was a human rickshaw. But I did nothing. Except, that is, laugh good-naturedly at the quasi-comical beast as it bobbed and strutted ever closer.

When the rooster caught up with Jack I was still a few feet away. Jack turned to face it, a smile smoothing its way across his face. Unbeknownst to both of us, a split-second later the bird would punish Jack for his sense of pleasant expectation, and teach me a hard lesson in child guardianship. It all happened in a flurry. The rooster jerked and flapped about at Jack’s waist, then whipped itself into the air, its wings spread wide in shrieking fury. In the slipstream of distraction, it swiped out with its feet, leaving a scratch like a tram-line on Jack’s face from cheek to chin. There was blood dripping from Jack’s lip. It happened in a flash; a finger-click of time. I grabbed Jack by his shoulders, spun him out of the way, and pirouetted myself in front of the near-rabid rooster.

It leapt towards me like something out of a 2-player beat-em-up, using its wings to steady itself before unleashing a mighty two-footed kick to my stomach. It bounced back to its starting point like some demented little Mr Miagi, ready to strike again. And it did. It struck again, and again, and again, and again. I wasn’t the main target, though. Just a lumpy obstacle. It was obvious the maniac bird was trying to bypass me in order to take another bite and a scratch at Jack. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to keep angling myself and jumping from side to side to keep its gut-booting focus on me. Thankfully, it had no interest in my ball-sack, else I might’ve been forced to consider more extreme tactics.

At one point I hunkered down in a coiled squat like Chris Pratt when he was herding velociraptors in Jurassic World. I waved a hand behind me to direct Jack to safety. “Go, and keep moving,” I told him. “Go slowly, get to the pavement and wait for me.”

Poor Jack was still crying, but I couldn’t offer him much in the way of comfort without breaking my defensive pose, which would have put him at the mercy of more butts and scratches, more vicious ones this time for sure. What if its talons caught Jack’s eye this time? When the spirit of Chris Pratt didn’t prove effective I switched to Begbie from Trainspotting, spitting, swearing and kicking at the bastard beast.

All the while this scene was unfolding the rooster’s elderly and infirm owner sat on the porch on the stoop of his house about thirty or forty feet away, looking increasingly concerned, especially when he saw me booting the rooster’s chest, kicking at its face and calling it a ‘f***ing c***’ at the top of my voice. Eventually, the bird backed off, but not because of the sound and fury I’d subjected it to. No. It looked like it had just grown bored. What the hell was the old guy feeding these chickens? Cocaine?

As I was buckling my bloodied son into the back seat of the car, the rooster’s pyjama-clad owner shuffled over with his stick, swift as a ninja in his canvas slippers, and began offering heart-felt apologies. I told him not to worry about it, and apologised for turning the air a few thousand shades of blue. He insisted we come back to his house with him so Jack could have some juice and crisps and play with his grand-daughter; you know, spin a positive out of the negative. I said that was a kind offer, but thought that Jack would probably appreciate some distance between him and the rooster, at least for now. Besides, we had to clean his scratches.

Jack was understandably shaken, and shy to boot, but the old man’s persistence – his zeal to make amends – wore us both down. We got out of the car and started heading back towards the house – and the chickens. The old man clasped Jack’s hand tightly as we walked, a gesture of affection and restraint. I could tell Jack still wasn’t entirely sold on the new course of events. He looked like he was being arrested.

I kept telling Jack how brave he was, and explained that the rooster – though I was still quite angry at it – had only acted aggressively because it had perceived us as a threat. It wasn’t Jack’s fault, and it wasn’t strictly the rooster’s fault, either. It was just an awful accident, and, really, daddy should’ve been more careful.

But I promised him that the rooster probably wouldn’t attack again, but if it did, I’d be ready for it. Moments later, Jack and the rooster passed within twenty feet of each other, and I was relieved to see that they were wholly indifferent to each other’s existence. Some juice, crisps, and anti-septic wipes later, and it was as if none of it had ever happened.

The old man’s grand-daughter, of similar age to Jack, came outside to play. As Jack and the little girl ran around the garden laughing and conspiring, jumping this, leaping that, investigating here, applying their imaginations there, I spoke with the old man. I asked him about his life, his family. He’d come from Pakistan to the south of England, living there for a time, before branching off from his brothers and settling in Scotland. He’d raised his family here, three generations and counting.

I found him a pleasant, cordial and earnest man, measured in his speech, warm in his sentiments. He looked at his grand-daughter and my son laughing together, and he smiled. He told me how important it was for this sort of thing to happen, these sorts of friendships, especially these days. I knew what he was getting at. I agreed with him. I’m an atheist, and the old man was a Muslim, but the children in our lives were oblivious to the cosmetic and cultural differences that might exist between them and us. As it should be. They were having fun. They were happy.

They were children.

And we were all human beings, after all.

I’ve discussed grand topics like God, creation and evolution with Jack, but so briefly that I’m sure he doesn’t remember a thing about them. He certainly doesn’t know what Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or even atheists are, or what they believe (or don’t). He’s never once remarked upon the skin colour, make-up or ethnicity of another human being – black, white, brown, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese – not because he hasn’t noticed, which surely he has, but because he’s never been encouraged to care. My views and those of his mother’s on religion and politics will undoubtedly filter through to Jack and his brother, but it would be unfair of us to implant any of these notions in either of them at such crucial stages of their mental and social development.

I’m pro-people, but anti-religion. To co-opt and twist an infamous saying from Christianity: hate the sin, not the sinner. I always try to keep in mind that most people – especially in global Islam, but also in Scientology, Mormonism and Christianity in the US – are hostages to the religions into which they’re born. I was able to enjoy being around the old man and his family (more of whom came to visit later in the afternoon), because irrespective of the differing spiritual beliefs we each may have held, I recognised them as good, kind, and decent people.

The question I find myself contending with increasingly often these days is: how do I square my fondness for people, in all their multifarious, individual forms, with a wariness for organised religion? How can I square the reality of having liked, respected and loved friends, acquaintances and colleagues who were Muslim with my fear and distrust of Islam as a global political, cultural and religious force? I’m an atheist with two gay sisters. Show me any Muslim-majority country in the world where I’d be tolerated, or where Muslims within those counties would be free to advocate atheism or live their lives as gay.

I think we here in the British Isles can sometimes have a rather twee view of religion that springs from watching too many tea-sipping parsons on the TV, or inspired by the remembrance of a kindly grandmother’s sweet smile during Songs of Praise, when the reality is that we might yet have had the firm fingers of Christianity wrapped around our throats if not for several hundreds of years of protest, dissent, bloodshed, revolutions, reformations, refusals and the eventual triumph of enlightenment over darkness. Although it hasn’t been without its fair share of schisms and inter-denominational blood feuds, the Muslim world has yet to have its reformation. Attempts to soften or modify the religion’s shape and substance are usually met with banishment at best, and wars and murder at worst. While there has certainly been progress in some quarters, it is slow and uncertain.

Global Islam doesn’t appear to compromise very often.

Muslims don’t seem to express something so simple as solidarity; it’s rather as if Islam is one unbroken entity, a sheath of (thin) skin covering the planet, where pain in one part of the body is felt in every other part of the body. Touch ane, touch aw. Islam first, family and nation second.

The cycles of suffering, rage and retribution roaring in Islam’s heartlands – some of the most politically and economically fraught regions of the world – are felt in Birmingham and Berlin as much as they are in Jakarta and Lahore. Part of this connection is spiritual and ideological, but there is a physical component, too, in that rather than allow communities to settle and integrate into new host countries, the links to the heartlands are kept alive through immigration, and the importation of wives and husbands. That’s a worry when many of the countries from which the blood-lines are preserved and topped-up play host to brutal repression of women, and murderous intolerance of gay people and the irreligious.

That’s not to downplay the corrosive influence of Christianity – from creationists supplanting scientists in US public schools; to money-grubbing evangelists spewing out endless torrents of hypocrisy and hatred to the vulnerable and the uneducated; to arguments surrounding abortion, end of life and bodily autonomy; to discussions about sex, sexuality and equality across the ecumenical spectrum – but people here in Britain and across the West know that Christianity, particularly here in the UK, is a toothless force. I could dress up as the Pope and drop a less-than congratulatory rap about Jesus, I could draw a picture of God with a big pair of comedy breasts, or collaborate on a raunchy comedy movie about the life and times of Jesus, and at worst the blow-back would be a snotty letter sent into the Radio Times by disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

But if I was to depict the Muslim’s prophet on paper, or write about him in unflattering or critical terms, I – like Salman Rushdie, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other less lucky people like Theo van Gogh – would have to prepare myself for the possibility of either a short life with a brutal end or a long life spent looking over my shoulder.

But who am I to talk of fear when bombs continue to rain down on places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan? I didn’t ask for those bombs, I didn’t put them there, but in the eyes of countless millions around the world I’m culpable and complicit in their destruction. I’m a part of the oppressive, racist, imperialist and expansionist system that sees something it wants in the Arab and Muslim world, and snatches it by force. How much of Islam’s fire, fury and ire is attributable to its holy book, and how much of it was enflamed and fanned by centuries of brutal exploitation and subjugation of Muslims by people like me? How much of what we hear about Islam and Muslims is wilfully distorted by our right-wing media and far-right assholes like Nigel Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson’?

Can the circle ever be squared? In the end, it all comes down to family. Always. Everything we do.

A loud and rousing cock-a-doodle-doo blares above the reverie. It reminds me that it’s probably time to head home. Jack is running and laughing with his new friend. It’s like they’ve known each other all of their lives. He doesn’t want to go now. He’s having too much fun.

I shake the old man’s hand. ‘It was really nice to meet you,’ I tell him.

I mean it.

Here’s another question that history might have to answer, sooner or later:

Which of us is the rooster?

Jesus Loves You – That’s the Problem

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jesus

Letter from a friend? Letter from a terrifying stalker, more like. Is this letter supposed to bring me comfort? Really? It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to find under your pillow alongside a dead rat. A dead rat with blood-red lipstick smeared over its hellishly contorted face, and a message carved into its side with a stanley knife: “This how yoo mayk MEE pheel!”

And what in God’s name is Jesus – a God, the God – doing wasting his time on the indifference of one obliviously happy mammal while the whole world around Him echoes with the yelps and cries of the suffering of millions? Wait… shhhhhh. Shhhh. Do you hear that noise? That, my friends, is the sound of a malnourished East African child’s recently-deceased cheek thudding into the hot desert dust; Jesus could’ve saved him, but presumably he was too busy skulking around Scottish forests, jumping out at people from behind trees, and going, ‘WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO MAKE YOU LOVE ME, OPEN ANOTHER FUCKING VEIN??!’

It’s nice that Jesus/God takes a non-interventionist stance on things like genocide and torture (“Well, you know me, Archangel Gabriel, I really don’t like to interfere.”), but doesn’t appear to mind sticking his beak in when he’s feeling a bit mopey and sorry for himself. No lightning bolts to fry those who rape and beat children, but rainbows all round for all the underwhelmed, non-plussed cunts of the world who’re just trying to get to work on time – and couldn’t give a jumping jackhammer for Jesus. That makes Jesus angry… and you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

No, this note does not indicate the behaviour of a benevolent and omnipotent deity; this note indicates the behaviour of a psychopathically jealous ex-partner who’s wearing a moustache made from bits of your hair he’s snipped from your head while you were sleeping. Having read this puke-inducing letter, you’ve got to believe that Jesus getting himself put on that cross two-thousand years ago was nothing more than a cry for attention from the universe’s biggest sulk.

I can see the FBI shaping a serial-killer’s profile from this note:

This is a man with grandiose ideas far out of touch with reality. He exhibits extreme narcissism, illustrated by the way in which he capitalises the word ‘Me’. Through his use of language, Jesus reveals a deeply entrenched God-complex.

We can speculate that in his childhood he was prone to violent bouts of rage, and may have committed anti-social acts such as flooding the entire earth’s surface and murdering millions of people. He may also have experimented with turning people into pillars of salt. Almost certainly he pissed the bed until he was 13.

Remember the Old Testament? Same dude, different beard. God was a total shit in the Old Testament, and I think that only makes his persona in the New Testament seem more sinister (remember ‘New’ Labour?). Jesus makes me nervous, like he’s an old gangster that says he’s gone straight, but you’re never quite sure: “I used to slice a mug’s fingers off just for lookin’ at me funny; now I bladdy love puppies, my san.” You know, a crazy glint in his eye that suggests he could go off on one at any minute. Perhaps, then, he’s more like a violent husband that’s trying to schmooze back into his ex’s good books: “Look, I know I got angry and wiped out a whole country with an earthquake when you forgot to close the fridge door that day, but that was the old me. I’ve changed, I really have… I promise…” Yeah, right, Jesus, pull the other one, mate! Jesus is Trevor, and we’re a planetful of Little Mo’s. And if it’s niceness you’re claiming, let’s not forget that Ted Bundy worked on the Samaritans’ switchboard. 

Creepier still, Jesus ends his ‘From a Friend’ letter by saying that he wants you to meet his Dad. But HE’S his own Dad. What next, Jesus? Discount coupons for a two-night stay at the Bates’ Motel?

Anyway, Jesus really freaked the fuck out of me with this one, so I’m busy drafting the text for a restraining order:

Jesus Horace Christ, you are prohibited from being within 30m of Mr Andrew, at all times and for any reason. This is in response to recent events, including:

Following Mr Andrew and his friends around the local park. You shadowed them on a parallel path behind the trees, intermittently breaking cover to blow in Mr Andrew’s face, and blind him and his friends with direct sunlight.

Breaking into Mr Andrew’s house in the dead of night. Mr Andrew said he opened one eye to find you sitting in a chair next to his bed. Your arm was outstretched and your fingers were approximately five inches from his face. You were crying, and mumbling to yourself: ‘I just want to touch you.’ You then opened the curtains and flooded the room with moonlight, muttering to yourself about DVDs of yours that were still in Mr Andrew’s possession. Mr Andrew was awake but was so terrified that he pretended to be asleep, hoping that you would leave the house of your own volition.

 

Folks, be afraid… be very afraid: Jesus loves you.

In Heaven, no one can hear you scream.

 

 

 

 

Jesus Christ!

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I never doctored these, or came up with the idea, but I just had to share them. Very funny. The theme is ‘Jesus is a Jerk’, and I suspect the images are from Christian materials that have been subverted/raped by cheeky wee scamps the world over.