Author Archives: paulbilic2003

December 28: a biblical Christmas

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The Bible is such a pickle. There are accounts of the nativity in Matthew and Luke only. Matthew has the Wise Men, Luke has the Shepherds. Neither has both. It looks like Luke didn’t like Magi; he has a go at them in Acts, which he may well have also written. They are not kings, of course, but magician people, maybe astrologers, which would explain the star. And there is no mention of there being three of them. We get Gold, Frankincense and Myrhh, three gifts, so we extrapolate this to three magi. In some traditions there are ten of them. Herod commands the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew. Herod died in 6 BCE, so it’s not clear why he would have been around when Jesus was born. There is no documenatry evidence of the massacre of the innocents, not even in Josephus who writes at some length about Herod, including his misdeeds, and does not mention it. In Mark, the original of the gospels, there is no Nativity scene. It starts with the grown-up Jesus of Nazareth. So, all in all, as usual in the gospels it’s a bit of a copy and paste job.

When you think Mark was written 70 years after the event, Matthew and Luke maybe 80 or 85 years after and John even later than that, it is not surprising that these are contradictory accounts. They were not eye-witnesses, they didn’t know anyone who was. They were written in Greek. Jesus spoke Aramaic. We know that Peter couldn’t write. Jesus may have been illiterate too. There is no reason to suppose that these accounts are much more than a set of superstitions. You get the idea. A man was surprised at a big gathering of people that there were enough loaves for quite a few of them. He told that to his mate who wasn’t there. It soon becomes a word-of-mouth miracle. Even today, with our better means of verifying information and post-Enlightenment mentalities, conspiracy theories abound. Merry Christmas.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

December 18: my sister, embodiment of our social history

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My sister failed her 11+ and went to a secondary modern school. When she was fifteen they had a careers class where they gave out questionnaires. What did they want to be? Air hostess; teacher; doctor; lawyer. The teacher took the sheets in and ripped them up in front of the class. Then she handed out the real questionnaires. What did they want to be? Street cleaner; laundry packer; cleaning lady. These were the real options. My sister did all right. She went to college and got A levels, then a degree. She travelled. she taught English in Greece. She met her husband. They raised a family there. After some years, when the kids were older, they came back to the UK. My sister trained as a primary school teacher. She’s been working for years teaching 7-year-olds. This year the management said: Don’t bother marking the children’s homework. AI can do that for you. My sister said: But I won’t get to know the children. No big deal, they said. It’ll free up time for some other bullshit stuff we want you to do (Bullshit being my word). She is quitting.

Here’s a perfect index to our social history. The class-ridden assumptions of the 70s and 80s; the brave new world of cheap travel and European opportunity; today’s cowardly bowing and scraping to tech and all the stupidity that comes with it. And a life as a perfect index to our blundering progress.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

December 17: the ancient stream

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On Harleyford Road, a road that connects Vauxhall to Oval, there is a section of the pavement in front of number 29 where, whenever there is a period of rain, a little stream occurs across the pavement. I like to say it is the stream that comes up from the earth that is the ancient boundary between Vauxhall and Kennington. I have made this up but it is a little lie that I insist on to strangers and one that illuminates my dreary passage down that road which must been the bleakest in christendom. I like to lie. I have for many years maintained to all and sundry that the St George’s complex next to the MI6 building on the south embankment of the Thames is referred to by all the locals as Glory Towers. I like to think I am spreading this untruth around. A little lie can brighten up the world.

When I was a younger man in Paris I used to tell strangers that I was a stuntman specialising in falls. It made for a better conversation than being what I was, a translator or a teacher. Though this, of course, would also be a way of making myself glamorous, an index to the vanity of youth. These days, those illusions are past. My lies are not focused on me but on my environs.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

(And apologies to all my readers about this gap in transmissions. I have been preparing the book which will be out in February ‘Monkey Sausage Nose: an antidote to self help’ which is a compendium of curated material from this site plus a few other pieces, all put together in a charming bedside volume. It should be available from Amazon or Waterstones but I would prefer if you contacted me directly on paulbilic2003@yahoo.co.uk for a direct purchase.)

October 7: my two worst friends

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I have a worst friend. His name is Co-Pilot. He is forever following me around, getting in the way, like a boastful six year old. When I turn around, he’s there at my back, wearing his child’s co-pilot outfit, some plastic uniform with shiny buttons and bold reds and blues just out of its wrapping. He probably unwraps a new one every morning just before I get up. He has drawn a thin pencil line moustache on his upper lip to imitate some real pilot but he is only six. Who is he kidding? He has a friend, more obnoxious than he is, if that were possible. He calls him his buddy. Buddy, my arse! His name is Grammarly. Grammarly will not let me be. He is forever picking me up on things, telling me he knows best. Grammarly is similarly about six, one of those know-it-all six year olds. He knows best, he keeps repeating. Where did he get these trite certainties from? Grammarly wears a kind of Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with shiny shoes and forever sports what he probably calls a winning smile and I call an obsequious rictus. Can’t somebody get these two individuals out of my life? I never invited them into it. What I plan to do is take them by the scruff of the neck, one in each hand, and march them out to the back of the house where I keep the old coal shed. I’ll throw them in there like an evil Dickensian patriarch. Good Riddance to the pair of them. I know I’m not supposed to do that with these shiny bright six year olds, but frankly I’m past caring.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

October 4: old spoon

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When we were on holiday this summer we bought some old spoons in a second hand shop. Quite attractive with elaborate handles and nice of shape, though with a mild yellow tinge to them. They sit in the big spoon section of the moulded cuttlery tray in the drawer now, along with the other spoons, the ones we bought new. When I go looking for a spoon for my Weetabix or porridge, I find I do not opt for old spoon but instead take bought-new spoon. I hear there is no taste of old spoon when you put it in your mouth, but I still haven’t got my head round it. Books I only buy second hand now, and they turn out to be in much better condition than any of the books I have that I bought new. But I don’t put books in my mouth, do I? We have recently changed our supply of drinking water. Every couple of days I go out to the courtyard and fill up two bottles with water from the tap there, the one that is used to water the plants. There was a feeling, which at first I didn’t get, that the water from the taps in the flat tasted less good. Maybe it was the pipes inside the flat that were getting rusty or something, making the water taste contaminated. I can see that. Now that I have got used to the water from the courtyard tap, I find it does taste different, maybe better, although deciding something tastes different is not the same as deciding it tastes bettter. Maybe if I got used to it, old spoon wouid taste better than new spoon. After all, when I go out to the restaurant or to somebody else’s house, I am tasting their old spoon, aren’t I? That doesn’t worry me. Perhaps it’s the yellow I don’t trust in old spoon.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

September 20: me at my most sophisticated

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On the TV channel SkyArts I read a little trailer for a documentary. It was a biographical programme about the famous and influential 20th Century poet T. S. Eliot. It said something like: The fascinating story of the life of T.S. Eliot, the man responsible for the poems that would inspire the Broadway musical Cats. I suppose they thought this would get more viewers in than the man who wrote the seminal modernist poems The Wasteland and Four Quartets. Barnard Castle was built during the Norman conquest and was was owned by the Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III. It was also, of course, the day trip venue of Dominic Cummings, advisor to Boris Jonson during the Covid period. Andre Previn, despite having spent his life devoted to Classical music as both a conductor and a composer, seems to be mostly remembered for his appearance on The Morecombe and Wise Show.

You cannot know how posterity will channel you or how others will see you. Of course, circumstances constantly force you to behave in a way suitable to the moment and away from your natural instincts and inclinations. Jobs push you away from yourself, make you act on behalf of the company you work for or more in keeping with your job title rather than your personality. It is a miracle that we ever emerge unscathed from the combat with the world. This act of shifting away from yourself for the sake of the circumstance is perhaps the most sophisticated act we have to perform as an individual. I consider myself fortunate that it is rare that I have to abandon myself to represent some other entity. Many people – mostly people with fancy jobs – just drift away, and when, later in life perhaps, they try and pick up that old lost self, they are not quite sure what it is thay are holding in their hands anymore. As I say, I’m lucky. The closest I get to abandoning my self is when I am just nodding along and pretending to listen to a dull interlocutor. That’s probably when I’m at my most sophisticated.

peoplearerubbish.com

September 2: colours

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I was in a second-hand shop in Southwold, Suffolk last week and found a pale green shirt that looked as if it might fit. Second-hand clothes are mostly in better condition than my normal clothes waiting for me at home. They’ve certainly been ironed more recently. I took it to the till to buy it and the young man there said , it’s the same colour as what you’re wearing already. I said, yes, I’m very predictable. Pale green is the colour I have learnt to buy. Different times of life dictate different colours. I can’t really wear red anymore like I used to, being high in colour as it is. I look like some Dickensian pie-eater if I’ve got a red shirt on. I have to have colours that compliment my high colour. By high colour I mean that as the day progresses I gradually move into the zone of spntaneous combustion. I start the day pale as an underfed vampire but as I move forward past midday the blood starts to flow. There is another batch of colours, I find. Favourite colours that I would like to wear but have learnt to eschew, whereby I am obliged to fight against my self. Brown is the big one here. I probably like brown so much as it was the colour my mum used to dress me in as opposed to the blue she gave my big brother. It must be that deep emotional pull that drags me into the magntic field of brown. Fashion, of course, is irrelevant, working on the assumption that we can all wear any colour for the benefit of their season’s profits. In recent years I have come round to the opinion that blue is about right for me, which, of course, goes massively against my deep-set identity, blue being my brother’s colour. My mind doesn’t know how to deal with this. It is just one of those things that keeps my sense of my own identity fluid, or, rather, dragged around a bit. I am not any of those things I once thought I was. Imagine that.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

July 5: opinion, ambition, aim, aversion, appetite

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The Stoics deal with only those things that are within our control. You might characterise them as opinion, ambition, aim, aversion, appetite. All the other stuff is beyond us, so there is no point wrrying about them. Body, property, reputation, office. We cannot much control what our body will do to us; belongings may be swept away; nobody can control their own reputation, in our hierarchised work we cannot control how we fare. Of course, we need to look at the things we can control too. Opinion, ambition, aim, aversion, appetite all see to be within our control, but they mostly come from the pressures of our culture, our background and the kinks our brain has given us. All this is, of course, the self, but not perhaps the self the Stoics had in mind. Our dreams are set for us by these little traitors within.

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June 28: the protocol of deceit

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There is no protocol for deceit. Not many of us get to inhabit the Hollywood of everyday life. We do not participate in high speed car chases through Paris by night; do not foil a plot to kill the President or escape the grasp of some shadowy foreign agent. But we do, practically all of us, play a leading role in the high drama of romantic betrayal. A mobile phone left charging on the coffee table; a receipt for a restaurant found in a jacket pocket; unexplained absences; a lightness of step that might reveal another significant other. So many clues you might pick up on, and so many of us may have lived these scenarios, either as the perpetrator or victim of deceit. Often both. Sometimes multiple times.

But we are allowed to change partner, are we not? It is not immoral to leave someone, but how are we to legitimately enact the transition? There will be phases in the decision to leave someone. Dissatisfaction; boredom; the encounter with another; the excitement of the new; the first transgressive act; the routine of transgression; the decision to want the change; the pact of the new couple; the practicalities fixed; the decision on how to break the news to the injured party. These are the stations of the cross on the road to betrayal. But on this spectrum, when does the poor behaviour start? There is no protocol of decit. no concensus on when an nascent affair becomes morally inadmissible. A gap in the market for some enterprising chronicler of the contemporary zeitgeist.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

June 22: your banner in the field will not suffice

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Authority needs to be erased, once you no longer have the authentic right to it. Teachers or professors can find that difficult. You can’t assume the right to authority, once you no longer have the role, even if you might still have claims to greater knowledge. You can find it difficult to assume the position of equal. It is only on the level ground of conversation that you might authentically assume authority again, but you must prove it in joust. Your banner in the field will not suffice. It cannot be taken as given.

Equally, signaling your identity cannot be acceptable either. We do not want to know what gender you are, what age you are, your greater experience or youth which might imply a greater skill or competence. Nothing must be assumed. As with authority, identitiy must be proven on the level ground of conversation.

I will judge you based on man to man combat.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com