Atheist Heaven

Atheist Heaven was what I should have renamed the internet bulletin board for which I served as administrator a few years ago. It was Carl's suggestion. We were speaking on the telephone and I could hear him struggling to breath as he rocked with silent laughter at the notion of Atheist Heaven. I liked it because it was funny and I knew it would annoy the more humourless members of the board. In the end they went for Thinking Universe, adopting a banner which showed an image of a spiral galaxy embellished with a thought bubble like you might see in a Popeye cartoon. It wasn't the worst name they could have come up with, but I thought the banner revealed a certain lack of imagination. Look, the universe is having a think!, which caused me to have a think about 1970s pub rock bands releasing albums with hopelessly literal artwork - the cover of Rockin' in the Jungle inevitably depicting band members going at their instruments in safari suits or else dressed as gorillas against a backdrop of plastic palm trees.

I'd resisted the internet for many years, but took the plunge around the beginning of 2006 after protracted nagging from my girlfriend. She didn't have internet access but wanted a relationship with someone who did - she explained testily - so as to save her the trouble of using the computers up at the library. She promised that my proposed internet access would give her a reason to visit me, which was of course very flattering.

At the time my principle interests were Mesoamerica and, to a lesser extent, science, so that's what I looked for when I first got myself plumbed into the world wide web. I discovered bulletin boards and found they served in part as a reasonable substitute for the social life I didn't quite have. There was Archaeologica, which touched upon several of my areas of interest. It was okay, but began to feel a little slow and dry after a while, and I found myself increasingly irritated by the received wisdom of mainstream archaeology as a secretive club which strives to keep the truth from the rest of us so as to save money on having to get all those archaeology textbooks rewritten and reprinted.

The Richard Dawkins board wasn't actually much better, but it was busier and they had an off-topic section where the more scatologically inclined users could discuss whatever they felt like discussing. Usually this was inconsequential shite of a puerile nature - what you had for breakfast, how much you hate Noel Edmonds, worse job you ever had, biggest poo you ever done did and so on. As with most inconsequential shite of a puerile nature, you probably had to be there. Richard Dawkins himself tended not to be there very much, apparently having assumed that most of those signed up to his bulletin board would spend their time politely discussing protons or how God is just like Father Christmas. Unfortunately, the one day upon which Richard Dawkins had some time off from splicing genomes, the one day when he happened to be there, was also the day when someone started a thread entitled Ass to Mouth or similar for discussion of a sexual act which seems more tailored to the composition of appalling jokes than to actual intimate pleasure as I would recognise it.

Richard Dawkins read Ass to Mouth, wisps of smoke trailing furiously from his ears, then deleted a whole load of similarly scatological threads and banned those responsible, not wanting his name in any way associated with the discussion of bums in a supposedly recreational capacity. I can't say this ever struck me as either surprising or even particularly unreasonable, but others using the bulletin board had much stronger feelings, having put a lot of work into Ass to Mouth and now suspecting that this virtual pogrom represented a violation of their freedom of speech, possibly even their basic human rights. About three-hundred members of the Richard Dawkins board therefore took their custom elsewhere, specifically to the Thinking Aloud forum as set up by Sid's Snake. The three-hundred included those who had been banned from Richard Dawkins' board; those who had left as a show of solidarity with those banned and who now didst go forth unto the wilderness seeking a bulletin board which wasn't quite so much like NAZI GERMANY; and persons such as myself who went along following the trail of chuckles, and who had never really been so fascinated by protons that we felt the need to argue about them with complete strangers.

Sid's Snake turned out to be some hairy metal guy from northern California, a couple of years younger than myself and who took photographs of the rock group Kiss for a living - or something like that. He was, in addition, a proclaimed atheist with an interest in science and all that good stuff, and he'd set up Thinking Aloud in anticipation of Richard Dawkins losing his rag and suddenly expelling a whole load of potty-mouthed angels from his virtual creation. In case it isn't obvious, I've substituted the names of those involved with those of characters from Whizzer & Chips comic because it's amusing to me, and I don't really feel like identifying any of the fuckers, having no desire to resume communications with them; so let us, for the sake of argument, work with the notion that Thinking Aloud was set up by Sid's Snake.

Thinking Aloud was fun for a while, if possibly somewhat impenetrable to outsiders due to the rise of small cliques of users with their own inscrutable sets of in-jokes, which seemed to be reflected in favouritism on the part of the moderators - those granted administrative powers to police the forum so as to prevent anyone engaging in cunty behaviour. Inevitably, as with any environment in which a certain percentage of the population take themselves far too seriously, after about six months there was a schism. Odd Ball had been banned for being a bit of an argumentative tosspot. Protests were made suggesting that with the expulsion of Odd Ball, the forum had become too much like NAZI GERMANY and Sid's Snake was actually a lot like Adolf Hitler when you thought about it, so Sid's Snake banned those involved. This was apparently exactly what Hitler would have done. Luckily Sweet Tooth had anticipated Sid's Snake losing the plot and had spent the previous months setting up yet another forum called Rationalia, so everyone went there instead.

I posted on Rationalia for a little while, but never really took to the place. The repeated schisms seemed to have generated a more concentrated strain of self-important atheist - unless they had always been that way and I'd simply never noticed. The atmosphere of the forum was jovial but often with a suggestion of the passive-aggressive, a nastily Darwinian undercurrent, like hanging out with a hyaena-pack of public schoolboys all waiting for you to say something stupid or to reveal some hitherto unsuspected weakness, but for now biding their time with knob gags or by quoting Monty Python and Douglas fucking Adams zingers at one another. Minnie's Mixer quipped that Rationalia was like a cross between 4Chan and the Richard Dawkins forum, which was I suppose her version of you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!, missing the point that 4Chan - a famously unmoderated image board - was at least occasionally funny, and Rationalia was mostly droning middle-class liberals with a pathological need to be right about something or other sat around agreeing what fine sport it was to scoff at Christians, to engage them in debate and make them cry. This was the point at which I no longer had any desire to call myself an atheist, specifically when it was asked how more chew toys might be drawn to the forum, chew toys being religious persons who might be induced to sign up and then bullied into either renouncing their faith or giving up and slinking off to general cries of victory, gloating, and congratulating ourselves on our magnificent rationality.

Additionally, possibly because God is dead with morality and even personal responsibility an illusion, the forum developed an unpleasantly sexualised undercurrent, allegedly expressed in an inner sanctum apparently modelled on back issues of Reader's Wives, driving at least some of the membership away. It was all very 1960s. Newly signed up and hypothetically female users - so far as it was possible to tell on the internet - were invited to post photos of their tits on at least a couple of occasions; but apparently that was just high spirits and anyway the hypothetical women hadn't minded so it was all okay. If anything, they had probably enjoyed the lively jocularity of the exchange. The suggestion that the forum had turned into a virtual knocking shop was deftly countered with arguments amounting to if you think the board has developed an overtly sexual tone then you're very wrong because the board hasn't developed an overtly sexual tone.

Brilliant.

I drifted back to Thinking Aloud which by this point was down to a regular membership of around three, excepting Rationalians nipping back to save HTML copies of ye olde precious threads which had been crafted by their own fair hands, the virtual artifacts which must be saved that future generations might benefit from the wisdom of Sexy or Salad Dodger? and its like. I had initially mistaken casual speculation about how one day someone might make a film about our little corner of the internet for sarcasm, but no, some of these people genuinely seemed to believe we were kind of important in the great scheme of things, if not the three-hundred, then we Atheists; or we friendly rabid atheists, as the Rationalia strapline had it.

Ha ha.

You don't have to be mad to work here... but it helps!

Back at Thinking Aloud, Sid's Snake had recruited a couple of his real life stoner buddies to make the place look busy, but you could tell they didn't really give a shit about atheism, science, the internet, or saying anything funny. Still, Sid's Snake had an idea. He was going to buy an existing atheist bulletin board and merge it with Thinking Aloud. I suppose having put some amount of work into the forum, he just couldn't let it go. He seemed to have a vision where the place was concerned. It sounded like a reasonable idea at the time. For all of its faults, I'd still enjoyed Thinking Aloud significantly more than any other internet forum of which I'd been a member, and I hadn't yet quite seen the appeal of facebook, so that was my virtual social life, or as good as. We had a look at a few other thematically-similar boards, mostly populated with humourless bores and thus entirely unsuitable for assimilation. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own, we suggested helpfully. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile, but they weren't having it, so the search continued, at least until we discovered Atheist Nation.

Atheist Nation had been set up by some guy called Robert a few years before, but Robert had become a born again Christian and had understandably lost interest in the board, which would therefore cease to exist when his last payment to the host or the server or however it worked ran out. Sid's Snake made him an offer, and Robert said yes.

Where the three-hundred seemed predominantly English Grauniad reading middle-class with just a soupçon of debate conducted by means of hilarious references to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - as an admittedly broad generalisation - Atheist Nation was comprised of generally younger members, mostly American and working class or at least blue collar, many of whom significantly regarded Richard Dawkins as a bit of a dick. If the Rationalia branch of atheism was a chance for a jolly interesting debate with the pleasure of getting to be right about something, over and over, for Atheist Nation it seemed more like a means of staying sane, particularly for those poor fuckers representing the lone voice not asking Jesus for a new car, job, or pair of tits in some terrifying Baptist backwater. Additionally, Atheist Nation had a few severely ornery types - as we say in Texas - as part of the equation, persons virtually incapable of turning on the computer without upsetting somebody, but it made for a less predictable and slightly more dynamic virtual environment than Rationalia's evolving festival of self-congratulation and cosily, familiar jokes.

The merging of one temporarily vacant bulletin board with the populace of another was a success in some respects, although not everyone was happy about it, this being the internet. Fuss Pot, possibly one of the most boring women ever to set people straight on social media, had been a moderator at Atheist Nation when it first started and had since found herself amongst the three-hundred. Now she returned to Thinking Aloud to protest the violation of basic human rights of Atheist Nation members. Wait until Robert hears about this, she raged righteously, unaware of Robert having found Jesus due to the fact of her not having given two shits about Atheist Nation for the previous five years. Sid's Snake was exactly like Adolf Hitler, she bravely protested in the spirit of Che Guevara, John Lennon, and one of those monks who sets himself on fire.

I could really do without this, I suggested to her, pointing out that Atheist Nation had been a sinking ship at the time of its assimilation, and that she was talking bollocks as usual.

If you don't like the drama, you should have thought about that before you became an admin, she typed righteously, ignoring my actual point, possibly simultaneously shouting at the computer screen; so that was me told.

The new improved Thinking Aloud began to settle. Those for whom the merge had been a step in the wrong direction drifted away, and a core group of regular posters established itself, remaining  stable for a year or two in so much as any form of social media ever remains stable. We had about five or six moderators, and the key to the board's success, if any of it can be termed successful, seems to have been that Sid's Snake had apparently learned his lesson and had taken a back seat in terms of running the place. He posted from time to time and he made suggestions, but he spent most of his day concentrating on some other related project, something he wasn't telling us about.

Months passed and it dawned on me that I'd never really wanted to serve as admin on an atheist bulletin board, having originally stepped in on the understanding of it being a temporary thing; and part of the problem was that I don't like atheists, or at least I tend to dislike people with a strong need to identify as atheist.

It comes down to basic manners. I myself have never had any strongly religious belief and could therefore most likely be considered atheist by some definition, but I don't see an absence of belief in something as a defining, interesting, or even useful characteristic any more than I would my promote my lifelong hatred of kedgeree as indicative of culinary credentials. That which drew me to atheist bulletin boards in the first place was mostly science and knob gags rather than a desire to discuss my not believing in something; and this has been particularly so since Atheism has become a cause in its own right and, in terms of social media, a stick with which to beat others over the head.

I understand why, as a rallying cry to those disaffected, declared atheism might seem a necessary means of combating the rise of extremist and fundamentalist religions, but is it really? When was the last time hitting anyone over the head with an essay and calling them a fucking idiot made any difference other than cementing them more firmly to whatever screwy convictions you were hoping to dissolve? So if it's all just pissing into the wind, what are we left with if not net-dwelling antisocials who are only able to elevate themselves by pushing down on someone else? It's not so much that atheists are inherently dull as that there's not much joy to be had from anyone who is able to discuss only one thing, particularly when that one thing is how they don't believe in something with such vigour that they're prepared to regard even the slightest variance of opinion as essentially cunty. Additionally, as Lewis Black has pointed out, you can usually tell a fanatic by their lack of a sense of humour, a definition I would expand to encompass the same old show us your tits jokes and Python quotes year after year after year on the grounds that simple repetition should never be confused with actual wit.

So specifically Atheist opinion expressed on social media has, in my experience, tended to fall into one of a fairly limited number of categories. Whilst whistles blown upon religious idiocy such as - for one example - Charles Darwin nudged out of the biology textbooks by educational systems which feel somehow bound to respect the views of drooling morons, are certainly to be commended, I've never felt it useful to start screaming about irrationality when dealing with inherently irrational people; and the problem is surely not so much their idiocy as the existence of a system in which their idiocy is granted currency. So most campaigning against religiously-inspired tomfoolery tends to take the form of don't you think this is terrible?! and serves mainly to consolidate a consensus view of yes, this is terrible without making the slightest difference to anyone but those nodding their heads and patting each other on the back over how much more enlightened they are than hilarious yokels from rural Arkansas or wherever. Nothing progressive is achieved, least of all communication, and most likely because it can be quite difficult to communicate with a person once you've likened them to a drooling thirteenth-century serf whilst channelling Terry Thomas.

Come to think of it, most specifically Atheist opinion that I've seen expressed on social media has amounted to don't you think this is terrible?! The aforementioned Fuss Pot had very little else to say, whether it was her suspiciously anti-Semitic campaign to have some hundred year-old carved image of a menora removed from a public building - because yeah, that one was a real violation of human rights - or her bravely facebooking of statistics demonstrating that gun ownership is most prevalent in areas of the United States with a high incidence of religious fundamentalism, because wow - who would have fucking thunk it, eh?

A survey conducted by somebody or other inspired a thread on Thinking Aloud seriously suggesting that Atheists are now the most persecuted minority in the United States. Whether true or not, the survey struck me as more to do with the adopted victim mentality of persons such as Fuss Pot who, like all good vessels of middle class guilt, tend to need to distract from their own privilege by expressing either solidarity with, or suffering parallel to that of those actually getting their front doors kicked in at two in the morning by angry retards. I tried to point this out on the forum, but the response was something along the lines of oh - so you think it's a good thing that children as young as six months are being raped by priests? You think that's a good thing, do you? You think that's fine?

This is about as much sense as I've ever had from persons who feel the need to introduce themselves as Atheist, those for whom not doing something is a defining quality. Of course, I can understand it up to a point, and I agree with a fair amount of what is written in Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, and I'm keen on the separation of church and state guaranteed by the constitution of my recently adopted homeland; but I don't believe anything reduced to black and white arguments of good and evil is ever helpful; and I don't believe that calling people delusional is ever conducive to meaningful dialogue, no matter how crazy they may be; because, in case no-one noticed, that's what the other lot have been doing all along and that's why we don't really like them. There are plenty of problems in the world without inventing new ones such as Atheists as a persecuted minority, and none of those problems will be addressed by don't you think this is terrible?!, or by further disenfranchising the opposition with divisions bearing a suspicious resemblance to lines once defined by class; and on a more personal note - or at least one more directly pertinent to my own private obsessions - there's probably not much point taking any kind of interest in human history, art, or even science if you're driven by some pathological need to divide everything up into rational and irrational whilst presuming the latter to comprise essentially useless information. If, for example, your understanding of mythology can be reduced to it's all superstitious innit, then what you have isn't really an understanding.

Thinking Aloud seemed to work better in its Atheist Nation phase, at least from where I was stood, and specifically because there was no unifying cause behind which we were all expected to rally, and no-one who gave a shit about Douglas fucking Adams. Occasionally a new member would sign up and make the increasingly familiar introductory post about Jesus being non-rational nonsense that is not rational and has no reason and is nonsense and is logically irrational, apparently expecting a virtual round of applause; or a patently crazy individual identified as Dennis Markuze would post bizarre and lengthy attacks promising all you little atheists are gonna get your heads cut off which we immediately deleted; but mostly the board ambled along and looked after itself.

Unfortunately this wasn't quite enough for Sid's Snake. He had a vision of something bigger, and he was never entirely happy about the way things were, the posting habits of the forum membership or our general lack of manners - which admittedly also pissed me off from time to time. Sid's Snake had vowed to maintain a strictly advisory role, suggesting rather than intervening because he'd learned his lesson and you guys are doing an amazing job without me. This didn't quite work as promised because every time he advisoried something which the rest of us failed to implement on the grounds of it being a terrible idea, he just went ahead and did it anyway.

He seemed to be getting more and more involved, despite promises to the contrary, because it turned out he had been working on a much larger project, a social media site called Evolving Hub, or at least that was one of a number of fairly uninspiring names. The most ludicrous was probably Symbiant Minds, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. It was going to be bigger than facebook, and Thinking Aloud would be just one small part of it; and I presume this must have been back before the advent of some new piece of shit social media crap which will be bigger than facebook was a more or less daily occurrence. Evolving Hub would be for like-minded people who don't like Jesus, and possibly even for some who don't mind him that much. We could blog on Evolving Hub, post pictures, have a network of friends, and keep all of our different bulletin boards open in different windows, and there would be something called the Pink Pages if we wanted to organise orgies of like-minded consenting rationalists, and Thinking Aloud would be somewhere in there too but Jesus, you guys really need to get the place under control. The problem was that Sid's Snake saw himself as some kind of benevolent social media Buddha smiling benignly down upon his grateful minions as we sat around politely discussing rational shit or arguing over which Judas Priest album was the most awesome, but it was never going to happen because Sid's Snake didn't actually seem to like people, and he never understood when they failed to behave according to his vision.

Becoming increasingly frustrated with us, and with threads which failed to resemble transcripts of discussion at the Oxford University Debating Society, Sid's Snake started up a new forum and began to invite us over to take a look around. There were a lot more rules and it mostly seemed to comprise sections he'd proposed for Thinking Aloud which we'd either rejected as too lame or had tried and then rejected when no-one took the slightest bit of interest. It began to feel as though we were dealing with a stoner version of Captain Mainwaring.

I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times, transatlantic calls made at his request so we could discuss the future of the place. There was a lot of hey in there, also man and dude and the rest, and I suspect there were a couple of times when he was actually calling from inside a bong; but he never really made much sense, and I could never tell what the point of the call had been.

He paid me a few hundred dollars to revise and rewrite the text of facebook's terms of use so as to avoid copyright problems when he added it to the Evolving Hub small print, this sort of shite:

Like most websites, we maintain an access log which includes IP address information. This is done for our security and yours. These logs are deleted from the server periodically, but we make no specific guarantees about their longevity. We reserve the right to log IPs at any time. To prevent your IP address from being logged you must access the site through a proxy server. The site's functionality may be impaired when using a proxy.

I came close to slipping into a coma on a couple of occasions whilst undertaking this task. There seemed to be pages and pages of it, and he was paying me because hey, you're the writer guy - you have the way with words and shit. Evolving Hub was going to make all of us rich, so what the hell, I thought, why not? That said, I had a hunch that Evolving Hub probably wasn't going to make all of us rich, and probably wasn't even going to happen given Sid's Snake's track record of periodically pissing off everyone around him, but it wasn't like I had anything better to do.

The sadly inevitable end came when Tiny Tycoon was banned. One evening he'd been there, posting away on Thinking Aloud as usual and the next morning he was gone, and Sid's Snake had filled up my private messages inbox with requests stating that I needed to get in touch and to back him up on this one. We had to present a united front.

First it was claimed that Tiny Tycoon had been redecorating our precious forum with the kind of pornography which Gary Glitter had on his computer. Then he'd actually just been providing links to a popular kiddy-fiddling site on our precious forum. Then he'd been providing links to 4Chan on our precious forum, which Sid's Snake insisted was a popular kiddy-fiddling site. When after half a morning of this I finally got to the truth, and it turned out that Tiny Tycoon had simply mentioned 4Chan in some thread or other, and had mentioned it because he'd recently looked at the place, decided it was horrible, and was telling the rest of us to avoid it like the plague. He hadn't provided a link and it wasn't the sort of site Sid's Snake had claimed it to be through a haze of weed smoke.

I gave Sid's Snake a call. He was raving. He sounded as though he was channelling William Shatner's acting. I explained that I had lifted the ban on Tiny Tycoon because the guy hadn't done anything wrong, and he certainly hadn't been attempting to promote  pornography of any description, and we probably owed him an apology. Sid's Snake went into a rant predicated on the understanding that I'd never heard of 4Chan, had no idea what it was, and hadn't actually said any of the things I had just said to him.

I set him straight. 'Yes, I've seen 4Chan, thank you. It's an image board without much in the way of moderation, and I'm not a big fan of the place either. Sometimes that sort of thing gets posted there and it might be up for ten minutes or so before somebody removes it and the person responsible is blocked, so what you're worried about is down to members rather than the site itself. It's no more pornographic than Thinking Aloud or any other forum. Somebody could post that stuff at our place, and we'd remove it and ban them. That doesn't make us Gary Glitter. Do you see what I'm saying here?'

He didn't. 'I've seen a picture on 4Chan where a fifty year-old dude has his [description of something you don't really need to think about], so do you think that's okay? Is that the sort of thing you think we should be linking on Thinking Aloud? Do you think that's cool? Would you like to see that on our forum? Would you? Would you? Would you like to see that? That stuff is okay by you, is it?'

I pointed out that no-one had provided links to anything of the sort, but I was wasting my time. I listened to another ten minutes of the same shit over and over and then put the phone down on him. Never trust a hippie, I reminded myself. I should never have let myself forget that one.

Sid's Snake engaged us in the staff room - a private area of the forum visible only to moderators - us being myself and the seven or eight other members of Thinking Aloud staff at the time. He stuck to his story regardless of the suspicious deletion of the supposedly offending material, the terrible thread in which Tiny Tycoon had posted the kind of pornography which Gary Glitter had on his computer, or provided a link to a source of the same, or not actually done any of these things. No agreement was reached, no admission of error or possible misinterpretation on the part of Sid's Snake, not even an acknowledgment of how many times he'd changed his story;  and at last I understood why most of the three-hundred had ended up hating the cunt.

He vanished from the forum and from our lives. Thinking Aloud continued with a few murmurs about buying the place from our drug-addled mentor, but it never came to anything and then without a word he pulled the plugs. A few of the others got to work on what became known as Thinking Universe, yet another breakaway bulletin board, and the Evolving Hub empire never happened; and I came to realise that on reflection I don't really like bulletin boards, or the sort of people who habitually hang around on them, or people who need to be right, or who need to belong to an exclusive club or a cult of any kind. It turned out that I already had friends, at least as many as I could possibly need, people who had been there all along even if it wasn't always obvious. Some of them even have views on religious or other matters which differ quite significantly from my own, because that's how the world works, despite the opinions of anyone who might wish it were otherwise.

Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained

I sensed that my mother had begun to worry over my efforts to cultivate paranormal powers. I was about eight or maybe nine, so it's possible that she was simply irritated, and I had interpreted this as her being freaked out by my trying to read minds and move objects with the power of thought alone. I hadn't succeeded, but even so was beginning to freak myself out, so I told her I was done with it all.

'It's okay,' I explained, 'from now on I'll stick to Pekes, Peanuts, and PG Tips.'

These were ordinary, wholesome things to which I would dedicate my time, having turned my back on the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained. The Pekes were our four Pekingese dogs, to which I was very much attached; and Peanuts was the Charles M. Schultz cartoon featuring Charlie Brown which appeared on the back page of The Daily Mail newspaper, and which I enjoyed so much that I'd taken to collecting paperback anthologies of the strip published by Coronet books. I never quite understood why The Daily Mail was our newspaper. My mother told me that her choice would have been The Guardian, whereas that of my father would have been The Sun, and so they had met in the middle, compromising with a paper from which they could take equal displeasure.

I'll come to the PG Tips later, but the main feature of my carefully prepared statement were those three P-words lined up in an amusingly alliterative sequence. I imagined my statement would sound worldly and wry, the sort of casual observation that Charlie Brown, Linus, or Schroeder would have made had they too elected to shun the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained. The sentence was offered as a knowing wink and a chuckle.

Well, let's just say I guess I've learned my lesson...

My mother failed to collapse into hysterics in response to my wit, although she seemed nevertheless relieved. She once told me that when I'd been much younger, as she was working in the cattle shed on the farm, she'd found herself overcome with a sudden inexplicable wave of horror. She ran back to the house just in time to save me from pouring a pan of boiling water over myself. Whatever the explanation for this, I believe my mother felt that the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained were best left well alone.

My interest probably came from Paul Moorman who was in my class at Ilmington Juniors, and who lived at Wimpstone Fields, the next farm along the main road from where we lived. Stanley Moorman - Paul's father - had care of 75,000 chickens and had a UFO detector in his garden. I recall the poultry quota because Paul would mention it from time to time and with such frequency that Thomas Mahon later proposed that his official school nickname should be changed to 75,000 Chickens from whatever it was at the time. The UFO detector was some mail order device designed to detect the presence of strong magnetic fields, although I never saw the thing, and I have no idea whether it ever detected anything. Stanley Moorman's esoteric interests were shared by his son who would lend me paperback books from the family library purporting to reveal the truth about flying saucers, ghosts, the Bermuda triangle, the Loch Ness monster, the Mothman, alien bases on our moon, telepathy, spoon bending, and so on and so forth. The covers were inevitably slightly lurid, and difficult to resist at the age of eight even given that I found the subject matter a little scary.

I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, particularly when the latter was cleverly presented as the former. For example, I was particularly confused by a biographical feature in the 1974 Dan Dare annual describing the space pilot's formative years and first exploratory mission to Venus as though it had actually happened. Inevitably, the truth about the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained, that which an elusive they had tried to cover up - as revealed in Stanley Moorman's esoteric library - all struck me as entirely plausible, which was unfortunate because I also found it somewhat terrifying.

Tales of spectral black dogs seen in the Cotswold hills were common in the playground, and the notorious witchcraft murders of Meon Hill were even mentioned on television from time to time. To these I added the fear that what had happened to Betty and Barney Hill might just as easily happen to me, and it seemed like the only way to address my fear was to learn as much as I could, to reach an understanding of the subject. This was impressed upon me each night as we all went to bed. Living on a farm in rural Warwickshire, the nights were often absolutely black, particularly during heavy cloud cover. I would look across the fields from my bedroom window and sometimes see lights still on over at Paul's house, but at other times the darkness was absolute, not even the nocturnal orange glow of some distant town or city, as though there was no light anywhere else in the world. I wanted to be able to look out into the darkness without being scared of what I might see; and inevitably, having learned to watch the skies, it wasn't long before I spotted my first saucer.

It was a silver cigar-shaped object of the supposedly classic design with a dark line down the side which I took to be a row of windows. It moved slowly and silently across a sunny, early afternoon sky from south-west, somewhere above Wimpstone Fields, heading north-east in the general direction of Stratford-upon-Avon. I estimated it to be travelling at about one mile distant from our house. Weeks later, during a school art lesson I asked Mr. Davies whether it would be okay if I painted the flying saucer. He seemed irritated, having asked us to paint something we'd seen in the countryside, but conceded that yes, if it was something I had genuinely seen then I should go ahead. I drew the curve of the hill as viewed from my bedroom with a smattering of trees to the right, all coloured green and brown with my pencils, at which point I came up against the fact that my saucer was visually unimpressive, and had almost certainly been a conventional aircraft. A little while later I showed Mr. Davies my artist's impression, a vast silver ship filling the sky, strange triangular modifications on the upper and lower surface with flames belching from the rear. I was barely even aware of his verdict as I came to a sudden and chilling understanding of my own bullshit. I hadn't seen anything even remotely like whatever the hell this was supposed to be; and let's face it, the thing had quite obviously been just a regular plane; and what in the name of God were those triangular things? Part of some sort of intergalactic toast rack?

I understood in that moment that I was almost certainly an idiot, or at least someone with idiotic tendencies, and I felt a little angry with myself. However, my anger wasn't sufficient to instil anything resembling a lesson, and nowhere near sufficient to overcome my addiction to uncovering the truth of the facts of the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained. I kept on buying those books, the shocking truth as revealed by Brad Steiger, Charles Berlitz, John Keel and all the greats of the genre; and even when I couldn't bring myself to believe quite so much as I wanted to, I kept on going because some of those books were often hugely entertaining regardless of the strength of one's faith in the mysterious world they described.

My next encounter with the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained was probably 1986 as I was living in an old half-timbered farm cottage in the village of Otham in Kent with a number of other students. I recall stories of the village being haunted, specifically by a ghostly horse-drawn carriage supposed to travel the road running past our house from time to time. Having since failed to find any reference to this tale beyond that preserved within my own memory, it quite easily may have derived from regulars at the local pub taking the piss out of those gullible art students; but I was nevertheless reluctant to dismiss the story as entirely ridiculous at the time, particularly as I headed home from the aforementioned pub, walking back down the unlit country road one evening when I heard heavy breathing directly behind me, so close as to suggest a person about to whisper something terrifying in my ear. There was no-one present but myself, and yet it seemed I could hear a spectral companion. I walked faster but my ghost kept pace. I broke into a run, tearing the five hundred yards down the road to our house. Gibbering with such enthusiasm as to be unable to hear anything but my own terror, I quickly fumbled with my key and ran inside, half-cursing the cold, unlit house for the fact of my being the only person at home. I slammed and locked the door, turned on the light, and sat regaining my breath, reminding myself that electric lighting established my presence in the twentieth century, and in an age of reason. Pursuing this thought, I considered my coat and how the rough material at the collar could easily have rubbed with the rhythm of my walking, creating the illusion of husky breaths close to the ear.

There was a terrific bang, like a single blow delivered to the door from outside by someone hoping one kick of a hobnail boot would be enough to break in. I nearly jumped out of my skin, for a second assuming this really was some malevolent spirit which had followed me back from the pub. I listened, and it was clear that there could be no-one outside. Perhaps I had slammed the door with such haste as to leave it slightly out of whack with the frame, creating tension as I pulled it shut and threw the lock regardless. This being so, the wood may simply have taken a minute to spring dramatically back into proper alignment with the frame. That was what I told myself, although at the same time I couldn't help but resent this rationalisation of the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained to some tiny degree. I later described this occurrence to Clare who lived upstairs, but my account was probably rendered all the more implausible by my being unusually drunk at the time. I vaguely recall telling her how I was worried that I had been possessed by an evil spirit, all the while wishing I could truly believe it and knowing I was talking rubbish in some weird and pathetic bid for sympathy. I was old enough to take a degree, but I hadn't quite grown out of embellishing my flying saucer with intergalactic toast racks.

Eventually I wasn't taking a degree, and by 1988 I'd moved to a crumby bedsit in Chatham, jobless and more impoverished than I'd ever been in my life. I would keep myself entertained with cheap second-hand paperbacks about extraterrestrial cattle mutilation and the men in black, eating whatever I could afford after beer money which was by necessity not very much. I wasn't a great cook, so whilst my culinary ingenuity wasn't an impressive resource, neither did it place unreasonable demands on my ability regarding the standard of what I ate. My signature dish was mystery meat grilled with a sprinkling of sugar served with mashed potato. Mystery meat was the cheapest thing that could be bought from the butcher's stall in the covered market, a tray of loose scraps and offcuts left over after the routine behind the scenes hacking and chopping was done, and from which I would buy a half pound at a time. I think it was pork, or maybe chicken. My friend Carl recalls visiting me during this period, and being served a platter of a half tin's worth of peas served on a bed of nothing else. I'm almost certain I would have garnished the dish with a knob of margarine, but I expect Carl is selectively remembering only the details of the meal which he chooses to remember.

Anyway, the point is that I may not have been getting my recommended five a day, because most fruit is boring and an unlikely first choice when you're poor and budgeting for food which will not only prevent you from dying but may also cheer you up a little. During this time I had a peculiar dream which I described in my notebook dated to 1st of March, 1989, as follows:

I had a rather unpleasant (for no apparent reason) dream about the Elu - they are tall and thin, naked and hairless. Their faces look like those of old men and they have a scratchy, grey and chalky complexion. They look more like animated fossilised etchings or petrified photographs, or even monochrome expressionist paintings (which are as I say animated) than people. Noticeably their shoulders and elbow joints are thinner than the sections of their bodies which they keep attached together. They ride on horseback. I do not remember if they spoke at all. The unpleasant aspect of the dream was simply how strikingly alien they appeared to be. The dream may have been set at night, I think, and if so they were luminescent.

At around the same time I found I'd developed a strong aversion to sugar which lasted a couple of weeks. Up until then I had always taken two spoons in both coffee and tea, but I nevertheless stopped immediately. Just the thought of sugar made me feel nauseous and for no obvious reason put me in mind of some sickly sweet and vaguely fibrous substance which I associated with the dream, and which I later realised resembled halva, a desert I had noticed behind the counter of a kebab shop on Star Hill but had never eaten. I was much later told that the dream and its attendant aversion sounded like an alien abduction experience, particularly the detail of my guys being identified as Elu, which resembled similar names from other abduction accounts, many of which could be related to the Biblical Elohim according to certain scholars of the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained. Whilst I liked the idea of having encountered beings from another world, and had even considered the possibility of something along those lines, I couldn't quite bring myself to believe that there weren't many much likelier explanations.

Eventually I grew up, and all it took was fifteen minutes spent reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan to convince me that twenty or so years of half-believing roughly whatever came along had mostly been just wishful thinking and a lack of imagination. The real world was actually a lot more interesting than the one promised by literature concerning the Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained. All one had to do was to look close, and try not to think anything too stupid.

'It's okay,' I had told my mother many years before, 'from now on I will stick to Pekes, Peanuts, and PG Tips,' except I didn't - although I suppose there was no real harm done - and that may not even have been quite what I said. I'm still unsure of the identity of that final P, although PG Tips seems a possible candidate because PG Tips gave away picture cards with their packets of tea, and I was in the habit of collecting these cards; or it may have stood for patches as I was keen on sew-on patches at the time. I'd spend hours browsing those offered in full page adverts in my Dad's Bike magazine, and I particularly liked the rude ones, for example the cartoon ducks mating in mid-air beneath the caption fly united.

I know, but I was eight.

I had two of these patches sewn onto my jeans, one featuring a rotund creature resembling a walrus jumping in the air beneath an embroidered exclamation of oink! The other featured a gruff, apparently naked ogre addressing a much smaller counterpart whilst pointing, his meaning communicated by the phrase sod off sewn into the top-left corner. I found this hilariously funny, excepting when adults requested a closer inspection, anticipating something cute.

'What is that?' Mr. Harding, who owned the farm on which we lived, squinted at the tiny embroidered letters spelling out sod off. I silently thanked providence that he didn't have his glasses with him, and explained that it was just a small cloud that had been added to the scene for the sake of realism, or something. I wasn't sure.

I had just two patches in all, although a couple of years later I acquired a third, a portrait of Charlie Brown stood gloomily beneath the phrase I need all the friends I can get. Sadly by that time I'd developed beyond wearing anything upon which it could be worn, but I bought it anyway.

My life time sum total of three sew-on patches probably doesn't quite add up to an obsession on the level of, for example, how many vinyl albums I presently own, but as an interest beginning with P, it would have fitted the feeble requirements of my attempted zinger; and as with many other passing fads of being a kid, the self-image of oneself as gripped by an enthusiasm was often more important than that upon which the enthusiasm was focussed. It seemed that one had to effect the appearance of being into things in order to have substance, and I know this to be at least partially true because I now see Junior expressing the same theatrical devotion for toys and games which remain untouched for month after month in the wilder corners of his room. This turned out to be as true of my sew-on patches as of those Strange Mysteries of the Unexplained. They did their job, but their appeal was ultimately fleeting, and there's not much point regretting the fact. I wish I'd been a little funnier, that I'd known that alliteration does not necessarily in and of itself constitute wit, but I suppose if you don't go through these things, you never get to the other side.

I, Column

Terrible news: Samantha has read last week's column in which I confessed my utter despair regarding her reaction to the column that was printed in the previous weekend's colour supplement. She is sat at the table drumming her fingers upon our copy of Teddy's first novel, Crime, Punishment, and Some Chafing - a terse and somewhat overwritten account of a young writer's struggle to get his first novel published. Samantha hasn't read it of course, but she's read my bloody column and God am I going to know about it!

'Perhaps you would care for some taramasalata,' I suggest in placatory mood. 'I'm rather peckish and it's very nearly lunch time.'

'Why do you do it, Hugo?' she asks me, quite directly.

There being nothing to gain from pretending to have misunderstood, I opt for brutal honesty bordering on sarcasm - always good to set off the pinot grigio with just a few drops of urine for the sake of texture. 'It's my job, darling. I'm a writer, you see.'

'You write about us,' she observes, quite correctly.

I say nothing although my forehead is cool with the sweat of the accused. Now stood, I seek sanctuary in the interior of our Smeg™ refrigerator, and it occurs to me that if I so choose I could quite literally seek sanctuary within its capacious inner space without the necessity of removing shelves, wine rack, or kumquat holder. I am looking for the tub of taramasalata but my eyes have fixated upon a plastic bowl wherein shreds of rocket marinade slowly towards the twilight of their useful and edible lives. Samantha served the salad when Francine and Toby popped in after Jessica's bassoon lesson, but I can't remember whether that was Monday or Tuesday.

It is killing me.

'My point is,' Samantha opines, snatching up the conversational gauntlet with a grip that clearly underscores my failure, 'that quite aside from the slightly lurid idea that your readers could possibly have the slightest interest in the existential angst of daily life in West Dulwich, I would just like to know where it will all end.'

I was braced for the thrust of the knife, but had not expected this innocuous and yet mysterious inquiry. I recalled the column in which I told of my midnight expedition to the Seven-Eleven on Lordship Lane, my witching hour purchase of Big Ones International volume eight, issue seven and subsequent frenzied onanism. Empty your shooters over my hooters, the tagline suggested and so I did without shame in the crushing solitude of my wife attending her weekend Reiki retreat. What compelled you to write about this?, she cried upon publication of the not-so-much-grisly-as-slippery details, why must you share every last narrative winnet in this way like some suburban Rabelais who never fully grew out of the delight taken in the contents of his own soiled nappy? Those were not her words, but that was nevertheless their meaning, and I saw it then, the infinite regress of the column about the column about my column, spiralling forever inwards.

'I am a writer,' I challenge, turning and wielding a container of lemon grass. 'Would you ask that I not write? Would you tell Waitrose to cease stockage of its pesto, spinach and pine nut pasta salad? Be glad that the bitter struggle of the creative troubadour is alone his to know and to suffer and send forth unto the world. Be happy that you know only his pain without feeling its sting.'

'Yes,' she says, eyes wearied with the burden of her own thoughts, 'and I wouldn't mind so much if you were actually writing about something other than the fact of your having nothing to write about. It really is terribly, terribly dull, Hugo, and no-one cares about the inner turmoil of a balding upper middle-class man or his self-conscious collection of Stone Roses albums.'

This cuts me to the quick, the mid-paced, and the slow; and thus do I buckle but not bodily, only psychically keeled over and there obliged to gaze into the howling wound of my own well-trodden fundament, that place in which I had sought comfort on so many occasions, my muse and my shame, the russet fount of inspiration; and I know in that moment that I shall write about this in my next column, and already I hate myself.

Writer's Block

Those four of you paying hypothetical attention cannot have failed to notice the slow transformation of this place into one of those blogs comprising two enthusiastic entries and then nothing for the three years that have passed since the most recent. This silence has transpired for several reasons, none being the want of anything to say. As a matter of general principle, I tend to frown upon writing about writing, films about the medium of film, and blogging about the act of blogging, but what the hell...

Prior to my emerging blinking from the space capsule into harsh San Antonio sunlight, I harboured this vague ambition of being a writer. Well, I suppose technically I am a writer, but specifically I imagined my endless wit and wry observations bringing the gift of laughter to the ten-gallon-hat-wearing people of this Parish, a successful newspaper column spun off from an award-winning blog in which I would cast an eye upon the things of Texas and make jokes about how they were different to the things of England. This, I reasoned, would be easy, lucrative, and a pleasant alternative to standing on the corner of Rittiman and Wurzbach at 6AM each morning, waiting for the truck to take my Mexican brothers and I away for another day of hard labour in the taco fields.

Okay, so this wasn't an actual plan, really just a vague formulation of something that wasn't entirely beyond the bounds of possibility. As usual I was making it all up as I went along, and when it came to actually keeping this hilarious record of nationality-based scrapes and comical misunderstandings here in the Land of the Free, I noticed that certain aspects of the idea were in fact somewhat crap. I already maintain another blog, as some of you may be aware, and whilst not exactly either serious or brimming with momentous revelations, it serves as a dumping ground for essays, thoughts, observations or anything that seems like it might be otherwise worth sharing. This Englishman in Texas deal was, on the other hand, intended to be less formal, more conversational and accessible to people who might not really care about Clifford D. Simak or how the God Huitzilopochtli founded Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The problem, to my surprise, was that whilst any number of topics covered by my other blog might be deemed indulgent by virtue of reflecting such obscure and perhaps specialised interests, I have a much stronger aversion to this sort of blog, or at least to what this sort of blog might become if it all went horribly wrong: the Here's What I Think of Stuff school of writing which presumes that someone you've never heard of will have an interesting take on something you have heard of. The worst excesses of the genre, at least those I've come across, might be epitomised by a column in The Guradian wherein some painfully middle class gentleman supplied weekly updates upon the goings on of his children (probably called Toby and Jessica) and the blazing rows with his wife, each one prompted by her having read the previous week's column and objected to statements made regarding her role within said blazing rows. I think the author was called Sam something-or-other, and to this day I am unable to imagine a scenario in which his continued existence proves in any sense useful to life on this planet. Me me me me me is not inherently an interesting subject, and I think D.H. Lawrence (a song, a dance and a frown) expressed this extremely well in much of his writing, and particularly in The Plumed Serpent (1926):

'Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it... And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.'

In other words, shut up and get on with it - as opposed, I suppose, to blogging about blogging as I appear to be doing right now. Anyway, my point, which I'm not sure if I've actually yet made or not, is that a lot can go wrong if one writes too specifically for an audience, and particularly if that audience is oneself, or how one imagines oneself to be. And I fear I may have initially written whilst following a vague trajectory that would ultimately lead to Bridget Jones - the film of which derives from a twee newspaper column - except I'd rather eat animal droppings than see myself portrayed on the screen by Hugh Grant, and would have to insist on Henry Rollins for the role which would itself lead to all sorts of problems what with his being an American and physically of a very different type to myself. Nothing of worth is ever done whilst one envisions the praise it might ultimately accrue, and I would extend this to myself sitting here imagining the chuckles that might be sublimated by some remark about Popeye's chicken (chortle) and how we don't (titter titter) have it in England (snurf snurf).

Ugh. Please....

So that, if any of it makes any sense whatsoever, is what has kept me from writing, or at least what has kept me from writing here. I fear this blog turning into a Fred Basset cartoon. The solution (following this entry which will hopefully serve as a sort of literary laxative), is that I'm dropping any self-imposed requirement of subsequent writing necessarily 1) making sense to anyone but me, 2) providing anything which could easily translate into a film with Hugh Grant, 3) containing obligatory amusing comparisons between England and Texas as a matter of course, 4) explaining anything the reader can look up on Google if they so wish (see The Guradian). In practical terms, this means I'm probably going to write for my own amusement (which I differentiate from any motive described above by means that you'll have to work out for yourself if it isn't obvious), and hopefully some of it will be enjoyable, but whatever....

Happy Stars 'n' Stripes Day everyone!