History Camp

Camping le Soleil

Next week there will be millions of people shifting themselves from one place to another over the long Ascension weekend, having taken the pont, natch. How do I know? Because every time I try to book a room in a stunning place or a large mobile home in a swish and comfy campsite, there's nothing available. Everywhere is full.

Which makes me think that the roads are going to be heaving next Thursday. Do I want to be in the midst of such a throng too? Could it be worth it? Seeing as we're having winter temperatures and a howling gale for the next 5 days, I'm none too sure.

These are some of the places I tried which are full:

Hôtel**** Restaurant Château de la Caze  near Ste Enemie (this was actually just wishful thinking) 
Hotel La Remise on the RL Stevenson route at Le Bleymard, near Bagnols-les-Bains, note the motobike tours link...
Les Criques de Porteils, near Racou beach and Collioure, voted one of the most beautiful campsites in France. I wanted to rent a mobile home here. No chance.

Never mind, I think we might have found a cosy spot in a 'pieds dans l'eau' campsite at Argeles-sur-Mer where, in the summer, 50K people crowd into a bonanza of sites crammed with tents, mobile homes and camper-vans. However bad it gets next weekend, it could never reach mid-July levels. There will be room in the heated pool, the walk to the beach won't be a queue, and the discos will be silent. 


I will be contemplating the 350th anniversary of the return of the British monarchy, the Brits having got fed up with a killjoy who cancelled Christmas and closed the theatres, and celebrate the fact that "The people of Britain chose pleasure over godliness; they chose the King whom they understood over the Republic that they didn’t". Frankly, looking at your average republic, one can but marvel at their judgement and foresight.

They got a monarch as head of state but with parliament retaining the legal mandate of the people. It established the constitutional monarchy we have today and did away with the 'divine right of kings'. No wonder they were ringing the church bells, drinking themselves silly, setting up maypoles and lighting bonfires all over the place. Maybe we should be emulating them and recreating the Restoration in street parties up and down the queendom.

The message then as now was 'religious nutters, we don't want you, go away' and of course many did, to the US where they could be as radical as they like, cancel Christmas all they wanted, and no one else had to take any notice. There is a message there, for today's religious nutters I feel - the rest of us are not interested, please do not disturb.

Had My Filling

You know how there's a certain point at which you become heartily sick of the medical profession? Well, I've reached it.

Last week I was sick and saw the doc, and also the dentist who'd I'd forgotten about but who kindly got his secretary to ring me up on my bed of nausea to remind me. At vast expense, natch. Have dentist prices gone up recently? I don't remember paying 60€ for a scrub and brush up. My eldest also got one.

I saw the doc who prescribed ineffective rubbish. Maybe he thought I was faking it, but just in case, sent me for a scan (are you pregnant, mummy? asked my eldest. Certainly not, said I, not at my age). I had it last night, having starved all day because you have to be nil by mouth for a billion hours beforehand, and I felt all light-headed and inept on the road. More vast expense and all to tell me I had nothing serious wrong, just food poisoning, and he did a general look around while he was down there.

Back to the doc today, more medication, hopefully more effective this time - some sort of disinfectant, I believe. Then being all bodily frail an' all, I've gone and caught a cold and can scarcely breathe.

Then back to the dentist for more scrubbing plus filling repairs. I sat there with a blue rubber sterile thing over mouth and nose, dying to sneeze and trying to sniff, after he'd poked a nasty needle into my tender gums saying things like, don't forget to breathe now. Ha, some chance!

Then I had to go back yet again with my youngest for his check-up. He got some sort of a varnish put on his adult teeth to protect them. I thought that pretty nifty. It reminded me of sessions having fluoride squirted into moulds and forced over my teeth when young. I'm not sure how effective it was, however, as I still had to have fillings.

Anyway, more vast expense - nearly 200€ and I've had it. No more! I can't take any more medical stuff, I've reached that point where enough is enough. No one had better fall ill in the next week or so because I'm having nothing more to do with any sort of doctor for some time to come. So tough!

* * *

I had a passing thought the other day, watching the Olympics. Seeing as the world will be Muslim within a few decades, and that the Taliban, for example, believe that women are good only in the home or under ground, dead, I doubt there'll be any female skiers by then. In fact, were there any devout Muslim female skiers at the Games?

I will actually be dead, hopefully, doctors or no doctors (male), so it'll be SEP (someone else's problem). Good luck with that one!

Religion Rage

I'm having a bit of an anti-religion rage at the moment. Not God-rage, but religion-rage, religion being that man-made codifying of manipulation and bossing about by power-hungry greedy abusers of people's fears and weaknesses.

Take the Catholic Church, for example. Last May we heard how children sent to institutions in Ireland were abused from the 1930's up until the 1990's. Yesterday a report was published on the Catholic paedophiles that rampaged through the priesthood with impunity between 1960 and 1990. Similar reports have been published in the US, Australia, Austria, France, Poland and Canada.

It makes me want to vomit with rage. This is what power does. It corrupts. It always corrupts. We humans are not fit to have excessive amounts of power and influence, and yet it continues and we see it time and time again.

Islam is the same but worse because it's in the fanatically violent phase that reminds me of the Catholic Church's fanatically violent phase, the Crusades. If they aren't threatening to blow us all up, they are surreptitiously taking over tolerant western societies with their high birth rates and slippery slope demands.

Last night I caught an excellent programme on BBC4, the History of Christianity with Diarmaid MacCulloch, a History professor at Oxford University. He'd arrived at the period of the Reformation when Calvin, Luther et al were promoting an alternative protestantism to the illogical and money-grabbing Catholic Church. It was a fascinating look at how protestantism took hold in northern Europe and how Catholicism reacted by gaining new adherents (and lots of wealth...) in the New World, sending Christopher Columbus there with missionaries.

One of the most interesting points of the programme was that both Catholicism and the new Protestants had no interest in progress (neither does Islam), and it's in the next programme that we discover how it was the American Evangelist Protestants who made America the progressive successful nation that it is today.

The programme has been made with the Open University, and they've set up an online survey to find out what it means to be a British Christian in the 21st century. It's an interesting survey, and gives space for you to write what you think are the most important values for the 21st century. I took the survey and wrote

• being free to think critically
• accepting that men and women are different but equal
• progress is a force for good
  
• learn the lessons of history - appeasement leads to power-grabbing
• rejecting of totalitarianism both political and religious
• human rights should favour victims of violence, not the violent
• political correctness should not be an excuse to offend the majority of a tolerant society

Take the survey and add your own ideas. I'm hoping that politicians will start to get the idea that the citizens of western societies are feeling under threat, and do not want to find themselves a few years down the line in an impossible situation just because a few bleeding heart lily-livered woolly-balled liberals in power thought that they could make everyone happy all of the time.

Remember the words of Lord Acton: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". That includes religious power.

Saved by the Bin

There are various types of nutters - you name it, some extremist somewhere exists and is hell-bent on devoting all his/her nuttiness to overdoing whatever happens to be their dada.

Religious nutters are amongst the worst and there's one making the news in France at the moment for starving his 8 kids almost to death. This Franco-Moroccan muslim man and his converted to Islam French wife live down in the Pyrennees-Orientales, in Banyuls-sur-Mer, better known for its sweet aperitif wine. They brought up their children according to the strictest Islamic education.

Apparently, his wife considers him an 'illuminé' but as she sounds as crazy as him, her opinion is somewhat dubious. Mind you, this guy does sound genuinely crazy.

Other guys cultivate being 'illuminé' to set up sects so that dirty old codgers can have sex with/marry young teenage girls and get loads of money into the bargain. Alternatively, they could go and live in Afghanistan where 80% of brides are under the age of 15, and men hang on for dear life to controlling women through bullying under the guise of religion. That's a load of tosh, natch, they just want to be waited on hand and foot, and just think about themselves all the time. Religion is a convenient excuse.

Religion is also the excuse for starving 8 children almost to death, to purify them. There was no malicious intent here, just a crazy interpretation of some religious text. You might wonder how social services managed not to notice that these kids were not at school, never went to the doctor and were kept inside with the kitchen door barricaded.

It was only when one of the boys, aged 16, weighing 32kg was seen rummaging inside rubbish bins with blood on his face because his mother had beaten him for stealing a pinch of sugar that someone called the police. It seems that social services everywhere are blind to the most obvious abuse. It's not like they had not visited the family before - they had, in 2004, but had given a 'non-lieu'. Amazing.

The father is trying to say that it's because they had no money that he couldn't afford to feed the family, but everyone knows that with 8 kids, he could get a ton of money from the Allocations Familiales, plus the RMI because he's not earning much - he's some sort of wandering salesman going from market to market. His wife is French; if she didn't know that, it's sure proof that she's insane too.

So the money excuse is baloney. What he really believes is that he was purifying his children through starvation. Himself too, mind. He didn't reserve purification for his kids - he is also nothing but skin and bone. Three of the children are now in hospital with severe malnutrition and the others have been taken into care. JUST IN TIME by the sound of it, or we'd be reading about the tragedy of these kids' deaths.

There's nothing like religion for making people crazy, and making crazy people appear 'illuminé'.

Giving Thanks

I might not have the world's most interesting job, but I do work for the Americans, and as such, get US holidays as well as French. So today, being Thanksgiving, I was off work - hurrah!

Actually, I think the British should celebrate Thanksgiving too. We could give thanks that all the lunatics who wanted to set up a fundamentalist religious state felt obliged to bugger off and do it elsewhere. The rest of the population were thus left in peace and able to enjoy themselves.

The legacy of their departure is still with us. You just have to look at the nuttier elements of American society, of which there is a sizeable number, to be thankful that they are not still on British shores being really annoying and not loving their neighbour at all unless he thinks in exactly the same way them.

Religious fundamentalists of all persuasions are equally painful. As one guy on a comment form put it recently, "they should get their own planet". Unfortunately, most can't keep themselves to themselves because they do like to interfere in the lives of everyone else - spreading the word, and warning of imminent destruction and a horrid afterlife watching daytime tv on repeat.

Life would be so much pleasanter if everyone abided by the maxim "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Just think of the trouble it would save if those on a nutty religious mission out to make nuisances of themselves just stopped to think if they would like it done to them. "Would I like to be blown up, cut to pieces, strung up, given the third degree, subjected to an Inquisition, raped, sacked or pillaged?" they need only ask of themselves. The answer, in all probability being "er, no" would mean they would all go home, put the kettle on and find something better to do with their excess energies, like playing frisbee with their kids for example.

Believing in a higher being does not oblige one to be religious. Religion is the opium of the masses, as we all know, having been created usually for the greater comfort of men. It's funny how women always come off worse in religions, being expected to be the 'little woman' and deferring to her 'better half' just because he's got an extra appendage and a few more muscles.

Add in copious quantities of guilt and not much fun and it's amazing how anyone falls for it. Mind you, it can be hugely entertaining too. My favourites are the Creationists who believe the world is only 4400yrs old, or is it 6000; it may have gone up... They staunchly, fervently even, deny any aspect of science that not only questions this but actually contradicts it, such as carbon dating. I must say, I'd love to be able to brainwash otherwise intelligent minds with such success.

What would I do with my new-found power? I'd instil in everyone the importance of doing unto others what they would have them do to you, and reminding them that moderation is best for most things which are fun (eating crisps, alcohol, playing video games, gambling, etc.) or even not so fun, like working. Religious nutters would be blasted off to discover Mars and asked nicely not to come back.

If only!

Would you Adam & Eve it?

It would appear that a creationist museum will open in Kentucky, showing dinosaurs frolicking with Adam and Eve. The Bible, apparently is the true word of God, presumably sent down by a heavenly version of texting seeing as there have always been arguments as to the exact nature of the translation of the Bible. You would think that God, in His infinite wisdom, would be multi-lingual and send down versions with simultaneous translation thus sparing scholars much pedantic discussion.

What intrigues me is why the Bible is the Ultimate Source of creation. Why not some other holy book? What's so indisputably certain about the Bible? If evolution did not occur at all, what colour were Adam and Eve, and how come we have morphologically different men and women in different parts of the globe? Didn't they evolve along with their climatic circumstances? If humans evolved thus, why didn't any other evolution occur?

Why is it that just because some folks cannot understand how cells evolved in different ways that they didn't do this? Hey, I don't understand how people solve maths problems about trains travelling at certain miles per hour, but I would never dream of suggesting that those who can are crazy and delusional.

Creationism is cosy, yes, but that doesn't mean it's True. It just seems to be based on 'I don't understand how evolution could happen, therefore it ain't true'.

What tickles me most is that the creationist museum curators will have nothing to do with Intelligent Design which is Creationism without the crazy literal Bible element. They still have the 'I don't understand anything so it can't be true thinking', of course.

Ah, religion. I wonder what Buddhists think. Who created their universe?