Hell in a Handcart

During our scheduled, Saturday-evening debating competitions, Part-Time Wife often poses the question as to when the liberals (who are only liberal if you agree with everything they say) will concoct some event that is so completely ludicrous and self-contradictory that they will realise the absurdity of their campaign and self-implode in a puff of logic. With admirable urbanity, I usually take a puff on my cigar to allow a sufficient pause to underline my subsequent assertion that this ground zero moment has already happened. I refer my learned colleague to this article as proof positive that it is too late: the World has already gone to Hell in a handcart. Take a while to read it there; I have to get the espresso pot going on the stove and find out where Part-Time Wife spent the night in case she wants a cup of tea or something.

Our weekly, scheduled debating competitions, by the way, are quite separate, and different in nature, to our daily, impromptu arguments. The family that fights together, stays together, I always say. Usually during a fight when one party is threatening to leave home. While the weekly debate has a set topic that is released a day in advance to the participants in order to allow them to marshal their ideas and opinions on the subject, the daily arguments can be about any matter under the Sun, and participants are forced to come up with thrusts and counter-thrusts completely off the top of their heads. I have a decided advantage in this, obviously, as I have a bigger head, and there are, therefore, more caustic remarks and devastating put-downs just queuing up there on its horizontal top surface waiting to be put to good use. Also, while the Saturday debate has fixed start and end times, the daily disputes can rumble on interminably, sometimes even extending into the next day and becoming entangled in that day’s point of dispute. I keep trying to impress on Part-Time Wife the validity of TS Eliot’s contention in Four Quartets that neither time future nor time past actually exist, but she is very resistant to this notion. Thus at a five minute remove from some egregious crime of mine – not putting the wet towel in the correct drying place, not having done last night’s dishes yet, neglecting to feed the children yesterday; the list is (seemingly) endless – I will advise Part-Time Wife to move on, that the event is now undeniably in the past, and, as such, does not exist now if it ever existed at all. She is having none of that, but then again, I have often suspected that all women are secret time travellers and can, at the drop of a hat, not only pluck some obscure comment or action out of its mists, but actually relive the emotions caused by the distant occurrence in such a way as to make them present, and relevant, in the present. Some trick that, and NASA should look into it.

Have you read that article yet? Now the French, God love them, have an historical association with absurdity due to Albert Camus and the Existentials (great band, that), but that news story in the article not only takes the biscuit, it smashes it into smithereens, spits it out on the ground and tramples on it with a hob-nailed boot. Forget about the whole gay marriage aspect of the story, that is not my beef (today). Here we have a state ceremony to honour a fallen policeman of the state murdered by the muslim attack on the Champs Élysées. The ceremony is of such importance nationally that both the French President and the Mayor of Paris are in attendance. So far so good. But, and it is quite a big but, the actual ceremony is a marriage in which the dead policeman (and please note the adjective there before the noun) is married, posthumously obviously, to his boyfriend. Whatever about the insanity of live people voluntarily entering themselves for life into the institution known as marriage, to extend the madness to perfectly innocent dead people is into the realms of science-fiction, and we know how mad that is. What next? I have always fancied Marilyn Munroe a bit: can I jump on a plane to France, give the Pres a quick invite on the phone, rock up at the Paris Town Hall and knock on the Mayor’s door and ask him to hurry up and marry me to Ms Munroe as I have a plane to catch back to the hacienda where I have a special room prepared for her rotting corpse and the first night nuptials? If not, why not, given that gay people are running around France marrying dead policemen like they are going out of business? Is it because I is straight?

Anyway, up to yet, as Ron Atkinson used to say as further demonstration that the first language of most English soccer commentators is not English, that incident in France was my prime example of the proof that the World has already gone to Hell in a handcart and that we should not be expecting and further demonstrations. But now, today, it has a rival in terms of illogicality and stupidity, in this announcement from the Minister for Education for Norn Iron.

No further comment.