"Things I Don't Understand", no. 758

In a few weeks we will be mixing a load of pagan rituals with some other vague details from Christianity, dragging fir trees from the frozen North into our living rooms and decorating them with glass balls, a tradition originally from Germany, hanging up mistletoe due to a vague memory of a Norse myth about Frigga and Balder, and so on and so forth, all to celebrate the birth of a baby in the sultry Middle East, and I have to confess to yet another thing I don't understand...

Last week there was some governor in a southern US state gathering a bunch of his supporters and going to the city hall to pray for rain because they were going through a drought and then this week a teacher from Liverpool, now living in Sudan, was arrested and threatened with a lashing and a jail sentence because the 6 and 7 year old kids in her primary school class had given a teddy bear the name Mohammed.

Doesn't anyone see the utter lunacy in all this?

I gave up all this religious codswallop when I was a teenager and nothing I have seen or heard of since has made me regret my own personal epiphaneia (in the Ancient Greek sense) for a moment...

p.s. this has NOTHING to do with me being a grumpy old git because of England failing to qualify!!

Application...or Lack of It

There's the medieval version:
Stephen of MacClaren was taken to the Tower of London and beheaded...

And there's the modern version:
Steve McClaren was fired and given two and a half million pounds...

And as for the players, I think it should be compulsory for the next England manager to sign a document in which he or she affirms that he or she is aware of the fact that all the players available for the national team are complete and utter thickheads and that all tactics will be spelled out in tedious detail.

I have already made a start at writing the training manual.

Week 1: Passing the ball

Week 2: Passing the ball to another player

Week 3: Passing the ball to another player IN YOUR TEAM.

All Parents Do It

One of the nicest things about having kids is that quite often you get the chance to be proud of them. You will have noticed in my posts over the long years - assuming you have taken the time to scrutinise them duly - that I have been proud of all four of my kids on various occasions.

Tonight it was the turn of Jimmy, my older son.

I have just got back (with a quick stop off at the pub round the corner for a couple of Augustiners) from watching him star (really!) in the Rosenkavalier, in the back rooms of one of Munich's finest theatres, Prinzregententheater.

In the role of 'Octavian, Count Rofrano', he really stole the show - along with the guy who played 'Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau'.

As his granny, who always wanted to get into theatre but never managed to get away from home to do it, would have said, "well done that lad!"

Ugh and Brrrrr.....

It seems Winter has hit deepest Bavaria.

A thin blue and raggedy grey sky yesterday, a sky whose colours have drained away and gone south, and a disgusting, gusty wind tearing at the branches of the trees and terrorising the soggy, brown, lifeless leaves. A wind which pierces your coat, your pullover, your shirt, your skin and comes out the other side...ugh!

And this morning a faint dusting of frosty snow to scratch off the windscreen...double-ugh!

It makes me wish that we could hibernate and say, "g'night, see you in Spring."