Pope-ular

Yesterday I had to leave the house at 3.00 to get Dash from school, as usual. The new pope was due to be announced and I had the tv on, but even though I waited - "Come on, it's two minutes past, where is he?" - I had to leave without finding out who it was.

Not that I even knew who the contenders were. Dougal wasn't one of them, neither was Grumpy Cat, and they were the only possibilities my Facebook feed had informed me of in the past weeks; but suspense is suspense and the Vatican knows how to play up a theatrical moment. I asked my friend-and-neighbour, as we bumped into her on the way up the road, if she knew, and we reminisced about past popes, as you do.

"When Ratzinger was elected I was teaching middle school..." she started to tell me.

Hang on. What? But she was a teacher a lifetime ago, and Ratzinger is almost new. I know it's a lifetime ago because her kids are the same age as mine, and she taught before they were born. I was ... wait, I was in southmost Texas, so it was my kids' lifetimes ago too, but I feel like the election of the last pope is still a pretty recent event because I blogged about it.

Which just goes to show that I've been blathering on here for a long time. For more than a whole pope, you could say, using the ancient and irregular unit of measurement.

Everyone's saying - where "everyone" is the people I know who might discuss these things - that they hope this pope is more open to change and more forward-looking and more willing to let in tiny things like, say contraception or women priests to the Catholic church. I said it myself yesterday.

But I've changed my mind.

The thing is, if the Catholic church did all those things that I and many other Catholics and ex-Catholics want it to, things like accepting contraception, and considering married clergy or even women priests, and acknowledging that it's okay to be gay (not even touching on the more controversial topics like abortion and euthanasia), it wouldn't be the Catholic church any more. So I think I actually agree with what Benedict said about wanting a "smaller, purer church."

If all the people who genuinely disagree with the church's teachings but still wish to participate in organized religion voted with their feet and left, heading instead for some more inclusive and accepting place (Anglicanism is not a huge stretch), the church would be much smaller - and perhaps have fewer resources and therefore less influence.

So many people stay in the church for the sake of tradition: because they were raised that way and it's what they know, and they like the warm familiarity of the hymns and the responses and doing what they always did at Christmas and Easter. Maybe because your mother would be devastated if you didn't, because you've never heard of anyone moving church - sure one's as good as another, even because your in-laws wanted to know when the party was when you had the first baby, so you had a christening even though you hadn't been to mass in years, and things just snowballed from there.

But unless you're particularly attached to the other things that only come with Catholicism - transubstantiation and venerating Mary and the saints are all I can think of right now - maybe it's time to move on. My mother was never a big fan of "a la carte" Catholics who take what they like and ignore the rest, and I'm starting to come around to her opinion, albeit from the opposite direction.

I know many people talk about working for change from within, which is laudable indeed. But the Church doesn't want to be changed. The Church would rather you left, actually, if you want things like equality and contraception. God is God, and I'm firmly convinced that he/she/it doesn't care what religion you adhere to and whose rules you follow so long as they're not hurting anyone else.

Then again, I'm an atheist 85% of the time, so you can feel free to disregard my opinions on God altogether.



Disclaimer: As always when I talk about religion, I don't wish to offend anyone and absolutely acknowledge your right to believe whatever you want so long as you respect everyone else's point of view too. The flying spaghetti monster endorses this post.

The Irish news

My American readers might be blissfully unaware of any brouhahas going on in European circles, so I feel it's my duty as one more connected with things happening on the other side of the Atlantic to update you every now and then.

Thing is, it turned out a few weeks ago that some beefburgers for sale in an Irish supermarket were not all beef. In fact, they were as much as 30% horse. Everyone choked on their breakfast sausages and vegetarians all over the country had a quiet chuckle. The rest of Europe thought we were all big gombeen eejits for not realising we were eating the geegees - until it turned out that horsemeat (and possibly donkey) was being substituted for beef in frozen lasagnes and ready meals sold all over Europe, and in fact the Irish were the cleverclogs who had uncovered these horrible shenanigans, which are starting to look like a Sopranos-style scam of the highest order, lining the pockets of some very crafty somebodys somewhere. Probably somewhere on a beach in the Bahamas.

I'm on Twitter these days (follow me! there's a button over there ->), and it's interesting to see how much more immediate and reactive it seems to be than Facebook. There were suddenly a lot of tweets about people being so hungry they could eat a horse.

Meanwhile, of course, the Pope resigned. That was news everywhere, and there were plenty of memes going round Facebook about how he was giving up the papacy for Lent and how the Queen thought he was a big ol' wuss for throwing in the towel. The Irish meme brigade were out in force with Dougal from Father Ted; because when you've a national cultural icon that's suddenly relevant (sort of) to global news, you photoshop the heck out of that.

Source: http://gingerbrownies.com/

If you don't know what Father Ted is, you haven't been paying attention. Let's just say it's spawned more catchphrases for the Irish population than Friends, Seinfeld, and Frasier put together.

Agnostic bible studies

Raising your children to be respectful agnostics is hard work, you know.

Okay, so we don't have to get out of the house in time for Mass on Sundays. Nobody has to keep their good clothes clean for church. I won't have to budget for the big bucks some people will be shelling out for First Holy Communion dresses in a few year's time. But there's a lot of explaining.

When Dash was born, one of B's aunts sent us a very nice Usborne edition Children's bible, with the explanation that she knew we were pretty religious. This was interesting, and also, clearly, not actually true, though I suppose we both had been at some point in the past, and she had attended our church wedding, so she wasn't being unreasonable. But by then we were busy not baptizing our firstborn into the Catholic - or any - Church, so we looked at it with some degree of distaste.

It's sat on the bookshelf ever since, because it does have lovely colourful illustrations. The only other book about God that we have is a really beautiful nativity story, with raggedy-winged angels in big boots, and text that's all but incomprehensible to the children, as it comes straight from King James. I like to read it to them at Christmas just for the poetry of the words, and explain the pictures in my own way.

So one day last week, Dash pulled the children's bible off the shelf and asked to read some stories from it. He's old enough to understand much more now than when we first talked about the concept of God - God as a type of superhero, God as possible fact and possible fiction, God as putative but not necessary creator of everything. So I told him that most of what was in the first half of the book - the Old Testament - was probably not true, or was what people had made up from old, old stories; while what was in the second half had more weight of fact and provability behind it to the extent that we know Jesus was a man who did exist and who was put to death by the authorities because they didn't like that he was stirring up trouble and trying to make change among the poor people.

He and Mabel enjoyed reading the stories of creation, the Garden of Eden, Noah's ark; and then some from when Jesus was a baby and a young boy, like when he was lost and they found him preaching in the temple to the elders. We didn't go as far as his death, but I said we'd read it nearer to Easter.

I'm presenting the stories, especially the Genesis ones, as just that: stories. I have told the children that some people believe that they're absolutely true, and I've also told them that - unlike with God, where everyone gets to make up their own mind - those people are wrong when they believe it. Science is not an option, it's plain fact, by definition. I don't want them to disrespect anyone's beliefs, but I can't in good conscience tell them that when people choose to believe that dinosaurs walked the earth with man, or that the seas were created in one fell swoop on a Tuesday, or that the first woman was made from the rib of the first man, that it's okay and they can believe that too if they want to. It's not.

Creationism is not an issue in Irish schools. Partly, I think, it's because evolution isn't anywhere on the curriculum - or at least, it wasn't on mine anywhere - but also because the average Irish Catholic has no difficulty with the concept of metaphor. We are happy to take God or leave him, and simultaneously understand that the earth was created over many millennia yada yada fish, monkeys, apes, humans.

So I'm happy to keep reading the bible with my children, and answer their questions as well as I can, and try to help them understand that these stories are good to know, just as much as knowing their fairy tales and their nursery rhymes, because they're part of the fabric of our culture and our history, and because they often come up in pub quizzes. Beyond that, it's up to them.


(I hope I don't have to put a disclaimer here about how everyone's entitled to their own beliefs and I don't wish to offend anyone with this blog post. I would be quite surprised if any reader of mine is a die-hard Creationist, but if you're out there, I'm sorry for saying you're wrong. You are, but if I was having a conversation with you I would be polite and not mention it, and do my best to respect the other tenets of your faith.)

Spice of

The existence of lesbians is giving my mother a crisis of faith. Apparently.

She said that the news at lunchtime today was all about lesbian weddings in Ireland.
"Where were all the lesbians when I was growing up?" she asked me. "None of the girls at school were, or in the bank [where she worked before she got married], or on the road where I lived. Where did they all come from?"
"Well, they weren't invented in the last five years, Mother. They've always been around. People just didn't talk about it in those days."
"But I don't understand what God was thinking about. Why did he make them?"
I decided not to tell her that I can't answer that because I tripped and fell into a vat of atheism.
"Maybe he just likes variety."

Electric avenue

Boom, boom, boom, Mister Brown is a wonder. Boom, boom, boom, Mister Brown makes thunder.

Right now it's lashing rain and crashing thunder and if Mabel wakes up from this unaccustomed early night - acquired only at great personal expense due to a total lack of napping - I will be most upset with Thor, or whoever it is that's in charge up there.

Monkey has been hearing about Greek myths again lately - he was talking about how people believe in God the other day, except he kept saying "gods" instead. I didn't think it necessary to correct him. There's not much point saying, "Well, it's God that we don't know exists. There definitely aren't gods, that's just wrong."

Oh. There goes the electricity. That was predictable. Time to locate the torches (flashlights, I mean; don't be visualising us going around brandishing giant flaming branches or anything) just in case. How am I going to get my coffee now, I ask you? I shouldn't even open the fridge to have milk with my cookie.

Seasonally appropriate musings

On Friday we went to a playdate, and I brought gingerbread muffins, because chocolate chips seemed inappropriate for Good Friday. I decided gingerbread, while not exactly redolent of repentance, was just that bit more sombre.

This year, with Easter Sunday falling handily on Monkey's fifth birthday, any quibbling about bunnies that may or may not leave gifts for other children or demands for luridly coloured marshmallow birdies have been pushed far out of the way by considerations like cake and ice cream and cupcakes and tomorrow's party. I'm pretty sure any notion Monkey may have had that there's anything else going on this weekend has been expunged from his memory. We were going to an egg hunt yesterday morning, but it was rained off.

I think it's at this time of year, even more than at Christmas, that I miss the pomp and circumstance of church. Once again, I puzzle over how to mark the special times of the calendar for my children without reducing everything to a present-grab or a frenzy of candy and chocolate and Red 40. I'd almost like to bring them to church, except that at this age they wouldn't last five minutes in the quiet alien environment, and anyway, it feels hypocritical. Easter Sunday is the most important Sunday of the year to the Church, and the priest always used to issue a special welcome to anyone who wouldn't normally be there (mind you, he'd say that at Christmas too). But even if I just crept in on my own to sit at the back and soak up the atmosphere or listen to the music or whatever I'd be there for, I imagine I'd feel either to a greater or lesser degree like an interloper and a hypocrite. I know they're all for the return of the lost sheep, but maybe not the return and immediate departure again for another year or three.

I do believe that the world works in mysterious ways, whether God is involved or not.

I do believe that there are far more amazing things than we can fathom on heaven and earth, even if I don't necessarily believe in Heaven.

I do believe above all that we should treat others as we would like them to treat us, regardless of irrelevant details such as race, colour, creed, or sexual orientation.

And I definitely believe that my gorgeous family is a gift, a privilege and a blessing, though couldn't say whether it comes from God or karma or the amazing random universe. In a way, it's all the same thing, so it doesn't matter.

Maybe we'll just blast Handel's Messiah on the iPod every Easter and leave it at that.

Cultural exchange of information

Some facts about St Patrick's Day in Ireland that American readers might not know:

- St Patrick's Day may be called Paddy's Day, but never, ever Patty's Day. Ever.

- St Patrick's Day is the national holiday, so it's a day off school and work for everyone. But it's also a holy day, because of the Saint bit, so you have to go to Mass. Before Mass you get a little bunch of shamrock, preferably with a clod of earth still attached, and you affix it to your lapel, like a very agricultural corsage. (I don't know where you get it. From your mother, usually. She gets it from her dealer, over a cup of extra-milky tea and some contraband custard creams. I suppose.)

- If you don't go to Mass, you miss your chance to sing the hymn of the day, Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, which is wheeled out just once a year, and which you've been practising in school all week.

- On Saint Patrick's Day you have a special dispensation from on high to break Lent. This means that if you've given up sweets for the 40 days prior to Easter - within which March 17 always falls - you are allowed to buy a large bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk and eat it while watching the parade. If you've given up the holy trinity of sweets, crisps, and chocolate, you can have a pack of Tayto as well. And maybe a bag of Milky Moos, but only if you go to the cinema.

- Depending on the weather, you may choose to go home and watch the parade on telly. This is allowed. If you decide to brave the rain/hail/sleet anyway, you will be rewarded with the sight of all the poor Texan majorettes in their short skirts and flesh-coloured tights failing to mask the goosebumps wondering why they came. But, to be honest, you can see that on telly too, so I'm not sure what the point is, except to feel like you earned your Dairy Milk. If your fingers aren't too numb to break off the squares.

- There are no leprechauns. If there are leprechauns on St Patrick's Day, they are deeply, deeply ironic ones. The Irish are a cynical, sardonic, hard-bitten race, and we know that the only thing at the end of the rainbow is rain, and banks lining their pockets with tax-payers' money.



Some facts about St Patrick's Day in America that Irish people might be interested to hear:

- Americans think we eat corned beef and cabbage all the time. I've explained numerous times this week that it's meant to be bacon and cabbage, if we ate it at all, which most of us don't. Corned beef is the Irish-American substitute because you can't get the right sort of bacon here.

- If you don't wear some item of green clothing on the 17th of March, people are allowed to pinch you.

- Americans have shamrocks and four-leafed clovers inextricably mixed up. Because four-leafed clovers are lucky, and shamrocks are Irish, and luck and Irish go together, so... that makes perfect sense.

- On the 16th of March children all over the USA are hard at work making leprechaun traps. The next morning they come downstairs, or go to school, to find that a mischeivous sprite has wreaked a little havoc with the toys or in the kitchen, maybe left a few green footprints, and possibly a peace offering of some green cookies or cupcakes.

I don't know why Americans find it necessary to give their children imaginary nighttime visitors so often: I've already carped about Santa Claus, and the tooth fairy will soon be breathing down our necks, but I didn't realise till last year that the Easter Bunny was also a real, live, fictional character whose cover I wasn't meant to blow while parents sowed the lawn with pastel plastic eggs - and now this. I'm a bit appalled. I may be That Parent if this sort of thing is perpetrated next year. (Monkey missed school today due to continuing pinkness of eye.) And I'm a big old curmudgeon, I know.

Happy Day of Greenness. I dressed the children in yellow and pink, and we had red lentil coconut curry for dinner.

To give than to receive

Yesterday the question of the day in Monkey's classroom was "What do you like most about gifts?" with options of "Giving them", "Getting them", or "Both." I read the question out, and while he pondered the matter, took the opportunity to expound quickly on the merits of giving, on how lovely it is to make others happy, yada yada... Without further hesitation, he plumped for "Getting them." I made a mental note that it might be time for us to have The Talk again. The one about the meaning of Christmas.

So this afternoon on the way to Target to pick up a couple more presents (one of which being an advance bribe for the booster flu shot Monkey has to get next week), I reminded him that we give presents at Christmas as well as getting them, and asked him if he could think why we might do that. He drew a blank. I mentioned how nice it is to show our friends and family that we love them by giving them thoughtful gifts.

Then I had to go and bring Jesus into it. (Atheism is hard, says Heathen Barbie.)
"Do you remember whose birthday we celebrate at Christmas?"
"No."
"Baby Jesus. Remember the story of the nativity?" (We have a gorgeous edition with beautiful pictures and very high-falutin' words. This one, actually.)
"Oh, yeah. Is that real? Did he exist in real life?"
"Yes. Yes, we know that he did, almost certainly. Even if the story didn't happen exactly like in the book." I try to be scrupulously honest when explaining God and religion, but it's complicated when you're an agnostic Catholic trying to pay due respect to matters of fact vs faith and probable vs propaganda.
"Oh wow. Oh wow." Clearly bowled over by this amazing fact/fiction crossover.

That was the easy part. Now how to get from there, across the minefield of God/Son of God; bypassing the whole died-for-our-sins aspect, into which I so did not want to get; to the point, whatever the heck it was, in simple terms and preferably in a single, pithy sentence so as not to lose his already-wandering attention. I leapt across the great schism straight to "... and he was a very good man who wanted everyone to be nice to each other, so we give each other presents at Christmas." Feeble.

After a little more in this vein, we were about to enter the hallowed aisles of Target, so I thought I'd wrap it up for now with a final pop quiz.
"So why do you think it's nice to give presents at Christmas?"
"Because then I'll get presents back."

Note to self: Try again tomorrow.

Secularism

We drive by the local Catholic church at least once most days on our way from our new house to wherever we happen to be going. Sometimes it's a Sunday, and I'm sorry, in many ways, that we're not taking our children into the cool, dark, peaceful embrace of familiarity that I would feel on entering the building. I loved the ritual of Mass, the soothing tones of the muttered responses, the chords of the organ and the warbling of our local choir of old ladies, the space to think or not think for a while, and especially the knowledge that wherever I was, I had a community to automatically belong to. Mass on Sunday, or Saturday evening, put a shape on my week for 29 years.

It seems mean to deny our children all that. (Plus the opportunity of a private education at discounted prices.) There's just the tiny problem that we're both pretty much athiests at this point, and, call me picky but it would seem hypocritical. I think if either B or I had strong feelings about God or raising our children in a religion, the other would quite happily go along with it rather than take a stand for heathenism, but somehow we both fell off the God wagon within a few years of each other and by the time Monkey was born the only decision was how to tell the grandparents that there wasn't going to be a Christening.

I distinctly recall wondering at some point in my childhood whether all this Mass and Jesus stuff was a hoax dreamed up by the adults to keep us quiet. (It may have been shortly after I'd been disillusioned about Santa Claus, which would mean I was 8 or 9, perhaps.) I thought it would be an awful lot of trouble to go to, and didn't seriously consider it, but it's interesting that it crossed my mind. And then, when I turned 30, I somehow went from being a card-carrying Catholic who firmly believed that children should have some sort of framework for belief rather than nothing at all, even if it was Catholicism with all its many potholes, to a sort of atheistic agnostic who felt that God was obviously a construct of man rather than vice versa.

Which leaves us in a bit of a vaccuum when it comes to some parts of childrearing. I want my children to respect the beliefs of others, of course; to have a strong moral compass and don't need to wonder what's right or wrong; to understand the meaning of God and religion and have a basic knowledge of their cultural heritage, including what Christians and Catholics believe. I want them to feel free to make their own choices without fear of ridicule or censure; but we do still have a responsibility to instill our values in them - assuming we value our values. Do I value atheism? Not really - if my kids want to believe in God, I hope I'll be happy for them. But if they want to join a militant right-wing evangelical church or protest against gay marriage or picket abortion clinics, I do think I'll be telling them how I feel in no uncertain terms. I should hope I won't have to tell them because they'll already know.

Last summer Monkey started asking about death, and God, and religion, and we had some good discussions (monologues, more like), but I think he's forgotten quite a lot of it at this point. I have to remind myself that these, just like the talks about where babies come from, are things we need to be talking about frequently, not just once upon a time. Sometimes I'm trying so hard to be politically correct and not offend anyone, that I forget it's my job to teach my children right from wrong and good from bad - if I try too hard not to criticize the man in the truck for smoking, they won't ever know that smoking is something I don't want them to do.

At the moment, Monkey mostly thinks churches are just big buildings for demonstrating how strong a superhero he is when he describes to me how he can lift them up. Maybe a field trip is in order.

I'm an agnostic, thank God

All this pope stuff has me thinking about religion. Again.

A strange thing. Even though I'm resigning myself to being agnostic, and plan to emphatically not bring up any offspring in the Catholic church, I have to admit that think I wouldn't feel fully, properly - oh gack, spiritually - married if I hadn't had a church wedding.

I know. I'm afraid it makes me a hypocrite of the highest order, but there it is. I can only put it down to my upbringing. Somehow, being married in the eyes of the law wouldn't have been enough for me - it would lack the extra magic (for want of a better word) that formally acknowledges that being in love is an amazing thing. Rationally, I know that we didn't get sprinkled with heavenly fairy-dust when the priest said the words, but, I dunno, it just seems to put a seal on Us that a registry office couldn't. It's very hard to articulate, but apparently even when I'm not sure I believe in a higher power, I still wanted him/her/it to sign off on my marriage.

Popes and chickpeas

So there’s the Pope, dying. I’m sure he’d rather he went quickly than lingered for weeks with the world getting daily updates on the state of his urinary tract infection (and I reckon the world would be happier that way too), so I hope all the people who are praying for him are praying for something sensible rather than the old “Please God make the Pope immortal” request. He’s old. Old people die. It’s nice when they can do so peacefully and privately, and not too slowly or painfully.

Anyway, what would be great, what I’d be absolutely thrilled with is if they’d choose a successor who would make big changes and drag the church into the modern day. Imagine a Catholic church with women priests, one that acknowledged that lots of great people happen to be gay and that’s fine, one that woke up and smelled the contraception. (Ew. I mean, the happy aroma of contraception as being a method of preventing disease and meaning that thousands of children didn’t have to be born and die in grueling poverty because their parents thought they had no choice. Okay, so it’s not exactly an aroma.)
I realize that’s not going to happen. (And hey, Word, I object to you automatically changing my s at the end of realize into a z. Stop it. Realise. There. Hah.) Also, I suppose if all that happened it wouldn’t be the Catholic church any more and we’d all just morph into Episcopalians or something. And from all I’ve heard, the way the Vatican is set up we’ll end up with a new pope even more conservative than this one.

On a lighter note. I’ve been displaced from my office while they take up the carpet and lay tiles instead, so I’m sitting at the spare computer surfing less efficiently than usual because I have to remember URLs instead of using my bookmarks. I’m also a bit worried because there’s glue all over the floor that’s our only path to the kitchen. Luckily, I have my lunch out here. But the microwave and the toaster oven and for that matter the forks that would be useful for putting my tomato and chickpea salad into my pita pockets are all in the kitchen. And I’ve a yogurt in the fridge. So I hope we can figure out an alternative route or they get the tiles all down (but not sealed, because that’ll be sticky stuff too) before lunchtime.

Considering how little I do every day, the weeks are going by at a fair old clip. I was presented with a mug full of candy this week in honour of completing my sixth month in the job and being made permanent. Now I can officially take vacation days. (Instead of unofficially, as I was doing before.)

Turns out I'm a universalist unitarian. Who knew?

I found a fascinating web site called Beliefnet.com, where they have information and news pertaining to lots of different religions, and handy tests you can do to find out what sort of religion would suit you best. It turns out I’m mostly a universalist unitarian, closely followed by liberal quaker. Catholic was at the bottom of my list of 27 designated religions. The nuns would be shocked. (Though I was a bit disappointed because universalist unitarian sounds like such a wishy-washy thing to be. It’s like saying “I want some religion, but I don’t really want one with any, y’know, God stuff or anything.” No offence meant to any UUs. I only discovered what Unitarian was about six months ago, so I could have it all wrong.) Anyway, one of the quizzes (oh, I’m a Recovering Catholic, by the way, which seems to be their word for “lapsed, but at least you’re here”) started me thinking about the afterlife.

Instant gratification is pretty much how people live these days. We correspond by e-mail and phone rather than waiting weeks for a letter to arrive on the boat from America; we can order a pizza and have it at the door, or take it out of the freezer and cook it in the microwave rather than going out back and killing the pig or grinding the wheat; we can see what’s happening on the other side of the world right now. Patience is still a virtue, but you don’t need nearly so much of it as you used to. So nobody’s going to seriously base how they behave today on what might happen to them when they’re dead. That’s far too far away. And anyway, they’ll be dead.

And then there’s the geography. In the middle ages, it was quite reasonable for people to believe that heaven was literally beyond the stars, and hell beneath the ground. Now we know otherwise, so where does that leave heaven? On a different plane, or a parallel universe, or maybe it’s just a state of mind. If you don’t believe in different planes or parallel universes, and you think states of mind are all in the mind, then you’ve a bit of a logistical theological difficulty.

All this said, I have no doubt that when my parents die, I will pray. And I’ll take comfort from the notion of an afterlife. I won’t be able to contemplate the idea of them just ceasing to be, in any form, so I will imagine them watching over me, seeing what I do, seeing their grandchildren, hearing me prattle on. I’ll need that. But on another level, ever since my grandmother died when I was 17 I’ve recognised that the idea of heaven is much more important for the people who are left behind than for the dead person, who is, after all, not in a position to be worrying about anything any more. (If I turn out to have to eat my words when I’m dead, so be it. That’s fine with me.) Heaven is a buffer zone we use to help us mourn; the area we put them in our minds when they’re no longer alive but we don’t want to understand that they’re gone for good. It’s as if they’re on a cruise where they can’t be contacted – only better, because they can see what we’re doing, or be reunited with dead loved ones. A family reunion cruise, then.

I think I can quite reasonably believe and not believe simultaneously. I can, after all, believe up to three impossible things before breakfast.