Category Archives: Religion

In every dream home

The burning of effigies is one of those things that I’m only aware of through news stories. I’ve never done it myself, or seen it done, but it seems to go on somewhere out there. I don’t really dislike anyone enough to want to burn a 3D representation of them. To be honest the people that seem to inspire my fiercest hatred, are the people that I tend to have the most fleeting contact with – drivers who don’t give the courtesy thank-you wave, or people who walk in front of me and then stop – and I rarely get a very good look these people. So even if I knew where to get effigies from, there would be the worry that the effigy wasn’t a good likeness of the person that I hated so much. I mean I’m not sure how much burning a very accurate effigy would really assuage my feelings of anger and contempt, but I’d imagine burning a bad one – basically a big anonymous doll – could possibly make me feel even angrier at the hopelessness of the world and my place in it.
Anyway I see it’s been happening in India this week, with demonstrators in Mumbai setting light to effigies of Richard Gere. But I wonder about the accuracy of the BBC news report. Were they really effigies of Richard Gere? The realities of the effigy vending business make me sceptical. I could just about imagine a 24 hour turnaround on your key range product (I’m thinking back to my days as a buyer at HMV here) – Bush, Blair, Uncle Sam etc – but surely Richard Gere – outspoken though he can be about Tibet – would not be in your core range. I like the idea of a vast warehouse somewhere in the middle of a desert with miles and miles of shelving and every single person in the public eye represented in effigy form. The staff constantly fearing that Michael Palin will insult the followers of some major world religion and thus expose their perilously low stock of the one man they thought was a safe bet. That’s how it should be, and that’s how lazy BBC journalism tries to fool me into thinking it might be, but I bet it’s not. I bet the effigy was just some crudely contorted pillow – with not even the gender, let alone the distinctive Derek Hattonesque ratty features of Mr Gere – clearly defined. I bet it was so bad that the men burning it had to keep saying things like ‘Down with Richard Gere.’ Maybe even resorting to scrawling ‘Richard Gere’ on the malformed head of the doll. Another beautiful dream bites the dust.

Infiltration

Nuns have recently discovered the arts centre where I work….now we can’t keep them away. We were showing a film called ‘Into Great Silence (Die Grosse Stille)’ a 3 hour silent documentary about Carthusian monks. How I laughed when I read the description. Silent? Three hours? Monks? Who’s going to pay to see that? All showings sold out within hours. I felt I’d entered some alternative universe where tickets for quiet, contemplative arts performances were fought over on e-Bay and Take That concerts had to be subsidised by the Arts Council.

Anyway the vast majority of the audience turned out to be nuns from different convents across the city. I was concerned that there could be a rumble between the different factions – but I guess they’d brokered some kind of gang truce before coming. In the event no knives were confiscated.

Since then the nun ball has been kept bouncing with regular, well-spaced sister-pleasers like ‘Miss Potter’ and ‘The Queen’. I’m quite enjoying this new audience. I’ve always been on the side that finds nuns very funny rather than terrifying. Three of my dad’s sisters were nuns – they rocked with the Marist massive – sporting French navy. All three of them were tiny – much shorter than my dad and the rest of his siblings. I could never work out if their lack of stature was somehow linked to their vocation – and if so what came first? Was it something about being tiny that allowed them to hear the voice? Or, more sinisterly, did marrying Jesus stunt their growth? I should add that this isn’t just true of my aunties – most nuns are minute. Never trust a tall one.

Anyway, sadly my dad’s sisters are no longer alive and so I’ve lost touch a bit with the whole scene in latter years. It was interesting to see how things have changed. The average age still seems to be about 79 and average height 5’1’’, but some things are different. I noticed that a lot of them now have mobile phones. I hope they remembered to turn them off during the film and didn’t keep texting each other big LOLZ throughout.