God only knows

About a year or so ago, my 33 year conversion from maternally indoctrinated Catholicism through Agnosticism to Atheism was completed. Thanks be to Richard Dawkins for 'The God Delusion' and its televisual translation 'The Root of all Evil?'.

At the age of 14 I started to challenge my Mum on why God would insist on me going to Church every Sunday instead of letting me play football with my mates. If God really loved me then wouldn't he give that love unconditionally? Isn't that the very essence of the emotion called Love? Why would he be so cruel as to stop me doing something I enjoyed that was also healthy, in favour of sitting through 90 minutes of full Catholic Mass in glorious mumbo-jumbo latin? Even when the church decided that as English speaking people we might be better served with Mass taking place in our own language all this did was shave about 5 minutes off the service. A 14 year old football mad kid is made to go to Church, whilst his laughing mates take the mickey and go off to the fields to practice the art of the volley, the feint, the dribble and argue over the foibles of the offside rule. You can see why this might be a catalyst for some alternative ideas to form in a malleable mind.

From this confusion on why God would expect such worship as a condition of alleged love and where I'd end up when its all over and the insistence on such worship taking place in direct competition with a young boy's passion for football there came a greater set of questions. Why does God put conditions on our existence. Why did God seemingly have no issues with the taking of life displayed in his treatment of Sodom and Gomorrah? Why so willing to lay plague, pestilence and flood on the world to teach us a lesson? Why allow people in his name to oppress others with such vicious cruelty? Why allow people to be born with extraordinarily cruel disabilities? Why insist that every newborn child be born with Original Sin when they have no concept of any human conditions such as justice, good, evil, love and hate amongst others? The more I questioned, the more I was rebuffed with answers derived from Faith. Non-answers I called them - the equivalent of replying to a child's innocent question with 'Because I said so' or 'Because that's the way it is'.

Nothing filled me with more anger than and confusion than the 'God moves in mysterious ways' maxim. I will never understand the solace people derive from turning to a God that has allowed their son or daughter, mother or father to be brutally murdered, or die from some horrendous disease. A God that not only allowed the person to suffer, but also those closest to that person as well. it all seems so vindictive and spiteful. An apparently all seeing, all encompassing, omnipotent being sat on his arse and allowed Madeline McCann to be abducted, Sarah Payne to be murdered, Jamie Bulger to be killed...the list goes on. And here's the thing, if we saw these acts taking place and did nothing, then according to the Bible we would be classed as sinners for turning the other cheek. Apparently Gods own law doesn't apply to him though. He can sit back and allow such acts or inflict disease with complete impunity. Some will blame another mythical figure for such evils, that of Satan, but by definition of omnipotence shouldn't God have rooted Satan out by now and done away with him? Shouldn't God forgive all those moving into the afterlife rather than further condemning them to an eternity of Fire and Brimstone? If the essence of Christianity is peace and forgiveness then does this also exclude him when he judges our lives?

So many questions remain unanswered and philosophically I just can't see any religious argument standing up. But why this tirade? Well last week I went to a funeral for my Uncle. He was also my Godfather, a title bestowed as part of his and my family's Catholicism. He was a decent chap, lived a good life and made 83 years of age, despite being so seriously ill 25 years ago he was given the last rites. This event was just one in a series of thought challenging ones that have happened in the last year, all of which would test anyone's beliefs. There was Hellsbells breast cancer scare. There was the redundancies at work, not once but twice and now prospectively a third time. The loss of friends and colleagues wasn't on a parallel with death, but it still hit home. During this time I shielded the team from a lot of the crap because in my old fashioned way that's what I believe a good manager should do. My eldest daughter, Kid, was in final year GCSE mode and the associated exams combined with the big moment of leaving school and watching adulthood bloom is another pressure. Pie's transformation from sweet little Daddy's girl into feisty teenagehood and development into a young woman was another change you can never be prepared for. The debilitating intercostal muscle tear, blood pressure and high cholesterol issues added another layer. The studying for the degree and the pressure of the exam piled up. The car accident which should have left us dead happened, but we walked away relatively unharmed. The death of a favourite uncle. The reason I'm writing this is to highlight the battering my new suit of Atheist armour seems to have taken in one year.

Its almost as if God had decided to put me through a series of tests in order to regain my Faith. It hasn't worked. Everything still has a logical explanation. Gods hand did not hold my car and prevent it from being squashed or flipped. The Atheism was always 99% with just a little bit of room for doubt as the truth is, despite there being no evidence to prove God's existence, there is also nothing to conclusively disprove it. If God does exist and he wants me back in the fold then there's an easy way to do that.

Meet me for a pint, prove your existence and explain yourself.

Later , GJ

Can I have a refund?

Slow news week?
















Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross are everywhere across the broadcast and press media thanks to a phone prank which at best was ill advised but is hardly the stuff to be headlining the news is it? Driving home yesterday the normally excellent Drive programme on 5 Live spoke of more or less nothing else.



So whilst people are losing jobs and homes, companies are being laid to waste, a banking and financial system so hideously full of corrupt and crooked gamblers continues to destroy our pension hopes, soldiers continue to die fighting illegal and pointless wars and the worlds self appointed Policeman starts to choose its next leader, the UK and its' Daily Mail worshipping fuckwit moral minority screams for the heads of two popular presenters who screwed up.

I'm no fan of either, Russell Brand's type of humour leaves me cold. I'm funnier than him by a country mile. Ross is a good film reviewer but a shit chat show host. Again I'm funnier than him by a long way, but the difference with me is I would be interested in what the guest has to say, whereas Ross is all about himself. Don't get me wrong here, what they did was puerile and inappropriate. They deserve censure for sure and a warning on future behaviour. But sacking?
And for MP's and then Gordon Fuckwit to feel the need to get involved defies belief. Listen you pricks...YOU DON'T SPEAK FOR ME so stop saying you represent 'the public'. Most of the public couldn't give a shit. The 18,000 complainants are bandwagon jumping morons without a sense of proportion or reason. It's obvious now that it's not about what they did, but more about how much they earn, or whether they're liked. I'm a tub thumping socialist of the champagne variety and this smacks of snobbery, elitism, moralism and the politics of envy. They may earn a lot but someone thinks that's value and for everyone like me who doesn't rate their 'talent' there's someone who does.

It's the same for MPs or public figures who have affairs. Sacking, why? What business is it of anyone's who they screw, eat with or drink with? Do I look at these people for a moral steer? Not in a million years. George Osborne takes a freebie on a Russian Oligarchs boat. Sack him they cry. Why? Do we assume guilt? Or is innocence now the thing to be proven whilst guilt is assumed? Who wouldn't accept a freebie like that to get a few free glasses of champagne?

My point is this. Our so called Christian society, allegedly built on justice and fair play now seems to be lurching inexorably towards a 'hang 'em high' society led by intellectually challenged, moralistic, fucktards living by the politics and values of The Daily Mail. My tax money is being wasted in Parliament by discussions on trivial issues such as this raised by publicity seeking MP's with no sense of reality. I'd like my money back please because I funded that waste of time in Parliament yesterday, and I funded MP's who felt it OK to waster public time and money with soundbite TV and radio interviews on what is ultimately a non-subject. Oh and Jonathan Ross went to see Andrew Sachs personally and apologise with a hand written letter and flowers. A decent response and a display of admirable regret. Good enough for Sachs apparently, but not good enough for the bleeding heart self appointed public guardians with too much time on their hands.

Is that what we really want? If it is then I'm off to somewhere that doesn't care less.

Later, GJ

The lifestyle changes are slowly moving into place. It took a day or two to turn the half empty glass into a half full one, but in inevitable Jack style it came true as ever. A couple of days mulling over the ramifications of being doomed to a high cholesterol count irrespective of diet has now led to the nightly consumption of a statin. Since Saturday I’ve alternated between a cycling session for 25 minutes on the exercise bike, swimming and a session at the gym. The cycling on the exercise bike rather than my beloved real ones is done with a view to building up enough stamina to cover a hilly 6.2 mile route (can we have Kilometres please, they’re so much easier?) without embarrassingly being overtaken by OAP’s riding town bikes…yes that has happened before!

The swimming was something I got rather proficient at but due to lack of practice the power levels have dropped alarmingly. Whereas once I could knock a 100 lengths out, nowadays it is far less unless I want 10 minutes breaks between each set of lengths. As for the gym…..well many years ago I used to go weight training (as we called it then) using free weights and loved it. It was hard but ultimately rewarding and the difference in terms of body shape and strength was frankly amazing. Nowadays of course I’m way too old to be pushing barbells and dumbbells around the place, so I told the gym instructor I wanted machines only. I don’t think he quite understood this as of the 4 (to start with) exercises he’s given me one is with dumbbells and another using a bar! Still, from acorns………..

I’ll periodically update my progress or otherwise here, but for the time being apart from the aches and pains the freedom from studying has settled in and perhaps given me the impetus to shape up. I know my target weight loss and so with baby steps I am now starting the journey to comparative fitness and better health through, admittedly, fairly minor lifestyle changes. But will it last?

That’s as positive as it gets at the moment.!

Just some observations.

I see the spineless cunts in the City are still as clueless and moronic as ever, acting in their usual cowardly like way to rumour and hearsay by trashing company values and our pensions by bringing the markets down. Is this really the only way? Why do we trust these people? They are no better than you or me, and I would argue that the knee jerk mentality of how they work would actually see most of us sacked for sheer bloody incompetence.

The M6 tragedy which killed 6 people yesterday – after what happened to us it certainly made me think again of just how lucky we were. Just what is the DVLA doing about the increased number of incidents that relate to foreign HGV drivers?

Did George Osborne actually do anything wrong? Are we now a society whereby drinks on a yacht automatically means corruption? The actual offence would be a valid news story if the Tory party had taken any money, but they didn’t and the whole story seems premised on someone overhearing an alleged request. Are we heading into thought crime territory? Must be a slow news week. Maybe even the press are sick of financial Armageddon stories.

I think my proposed political party might under a re-branding from Liberation to Reform. Hmmm…..doesn’t sound quite so positive to me, but maybe it says more about my political beliefs.

A rare thing indeed.....

Amidst all the bollocks around global financial collapse, caused by greedy, spineless, loathsome, pin-strip suited cunts (apologies ........that word is only reserved for people getting the full GrocerJack wrath), and the ensuing media clamour to escalate the news to levels of Armageddon like doom, as each arm from broadcast to print tries to outdo their rivals with more and more sexy bad news, along comes an article on page 2 of a major UK national newspaper which truly gladdens the heart.

Click here to follow the link and have a read.

Now isn't that the exact sort of thing we should be spending money on instead of paying obscene amounts of money to fat cats presiding over failed business models? Or lining the pockets of even greedier shareholders? Or paying obscene bonuses to the merchant bankers as a reward for GUESSING and GAMBLING? Or underpinning corrupt banks and financial institutions with money we've paid in tax to bail out there dismal failed business logic, so that one day they can get rich again and pay their shareholders the profits of our toil, whilst charging us interest to borrow money we've already leant them?

Hats off to The Guardian as well for breaking the mould and publishing such a potentially good news story and giving it such a high profile place in their august organ.

Later GJ

Change my dear...and not a moment too soon. Part deux

.........5 minutes sat there, eyes blurred, sweat forming on the brow, stomach churning, fear growing. The words of Roger Waters echoing around my mind...'And as the fear grows, the bad blood shows and turns to stone'. Then like a switch had been flicked in the central processing unit of the brain, I picked a question and thought...'fuck it ...in for a penny...' .

Is Shame a serious concern-based construal?

I could have answered this with one word. Yes! Or maybe no!But of course more, much more was expected. As I started to write the answer started to get mixed up, my arguments faltering on mixed references but eventually the ship was steadied and the words started to flow. One hour later, two packets of Dextrosol consumed, question done. Too late to change it now.

Is any version of the definition of creativity immune to counter-examples?

Not to an argumentative gobby shit like me. That's the answer I'd like to have given but of course couldn't. Two questions down and 55 minutes left.It's bladder time. Hold up hand like a schoolboy and get the disapproving nod of the invigilator, who for the day thought he was a German labour camp guard.

Does Descartes offer any good arguments for substance dualism?

Well he fucking ought to as he was the person who first championed this view. Hmm.....not really an answer either, but with 50 minutes remaining I knocked out a mind map and wrote an answer. Mission accomplished. 3 questions from 10 in 5 sections, 2 per section. Phew.

By the time we walked out, and despite my new varifocal glasses my combination of tiredness and eye strain meant everything was like looking through frosted glass. Add some right hand RSI to the thumb and forefinger after 3 hours of solid (ish) writing and the journey home was very slow and very careful. I was working from home afterwards but the truth is all i did was go through emails. By 17:00 I was fading fast and the evening was spent flitting in and out of jumpy sleep. By 22:00 I was in bed and for the first time since the bloody accident, my body gave in and slept solidly through the night.

That exam ended a sort of seminal year for me. A year of ups and downs and a near death experience that has made me re-evaluate how i live it. A year whereby my golf suffered through lack of practice due to injury (intercostal muscle), shite weather and studying. A year whereby my beloved bikes barely got a trot out because of injury, shite weather and bloody studying. A year when I worked under 3 different bosses as the breaker waves of organizational transformation battered the hull of Good Ship Jack. A year in which my orthodontic appliances or braces as we know them went from humiliating (elastic bands clamping the jaws together for fucks sake) to a stunning end result of straight teeth and the gradual realisation that i no longer had to put my hand over my mouth to smile. A year in which outgoings went up and real income dropped. A year in which I survived a car crash that even a month later defies logic with and end result of the family surviving when that is the least likely option on the pick list of outcomes after being hit by a 44 tonner.

And then today. Despite my best efforts to eat like a fucking rabbit, avoiding red meat, avoiding sweets and biscuits I go for my annual blood pressure check (fine - 134/77) , asthma check (better lung power than last year despite the off Cuban cigar) and flu jab (well, proper flu has been a stranger for a few years) only to discover cholesterol levels are as bad as they could be. Bad cholesterol is HIGH - over 5 apparently. Good cholesterol is very low - 0.58 apparently which is the Doctors worse this year. Weight - 94kg, slightly up on last year.

Despite my protests of eating well and healthily (most of the time!) it appears that my liver might just break down food that way. It wouldn't matter what I ate
if that's the way your liver functions then it'll never change - fucking genetics conspiring again. And so to add the cocktail of pills, Ramipril and Bendroflumethiazide, a daily fish oil and garlic tablet, plus the Becotide inhaler I will now also be taking something called Simvastatin until I drop dead. And that last drug means never having Grapefruit or Grapefruit juice again! Another avenue of pleasure closed down!

Great.

And so, its time to put the year behind me and start concentrating on things I want to do. So I hereby resolve to lose weight by exercising more, and so its back to the gym where Hellsbells works for yet another induction course. Its time to resume the swimming. I used to be very powerful at swimming. And the bikes have to come into use. It's winter so the bike I bought from Strings is being dusted down and bought into service as a winter road bike. I will start from 3 exercise sessions a week and build it to a daily routine, perhaps with Saturdays or Sundays off, depending on whether football is on. And golf? Well I need to find a golf partner as everyone I know only wants to play early Saturday mornings, but maybe if I stop the Friday Guinness then that won't be a problem.

Do I cut out my Friday night Guinness? Does that really make that much difference? I'll hold judgement on that. Surely life has to have some pleasures that don't involve physical exertion or rabbit food? My new year starts this week, I hope it's more fun than it sounds.

Later, GJ

Change my dear...and not a moment too soon.

So, a week in the South of France to revise zoomed past and it didn't ever get to the point where I felt in anyway rested or relaxed. True, if I'd stayed at home to revise I'd have got less done in all probability but the truth is wherever I'd gone to revise I would have ended up looking for ANYTHING to distract me and take me away from the incredible dullness of revision. Is there any real way to make revision fun or even mildly interesting? I will never use another weeks holiday to do this - my holiday is for relaxing and doing what I want....resentful..........moi?


Anyway, I drove back on Sunday leaving The Money Pit at 07:20 and frankly after the nightmare of the journey down i wasn't looking forward to it. But.......it went swimmingly! It took me 9 hours and 4 minutes to cover 657 miles, averaging 74mph for the whole journey, a seriously good average including stops, and I ended up in Dunkerque 3.5 hours early for the boat. The upside of the Eastern Channel crossings is that the boats are far more frequent than from Portsmouth or Plymouth, so I was able to get the 18:00 boat instead of my one booked for 10:00. It looked like I'd be home by 21:30 which is a good 2-3 hours earlier than I'd expected or planned. That is of course until I get to the poxy M25 whereby I immediately hit an hours delay due to an earlier accident. Bummer.

I got in the house at 22:00, shattered and increasingly panicked by the thought of the exam. I desperately tried to do some on the bloody boat even, and after I got in and was (warm;y?) welcomed by HellsBells, Kid and Pie I tried to get another hour or so in. My head hurt the instant i tried to assimilate more information. Is it possible that the brain has a finite storage limit? That's a cognitive architecture argument against the Computational Theory of Mind and a feeble attempt at Philosophical humour.

Guess how much sleep I got? Despite being .........I think the best phrase is fucked...........yep....about an hour because every time I dropped off all my mind kept doing was running exam scenarios through it. Ironic really when the exam was 'Philosophy of the Mind', but an irony lost on me at this point.

09:30 Monday, 30 minutes before the exam. I am sitting in the Hampshire Rose Bowl. All around me are OU students each to a person huddled over last minute scribbled notes cramming in as much last minute knowledge as possible. They ALL look far more intelligent than me. My demeanour masks a physically shattered bodily form, aching joints and muscles combining with overwhelming tiredness to make my inner self a shadow of the outer self. Descartes would have loved the dualistic analogy. But, I'd not given up, merely decided that if I didn't know enough by the time I left my house then I never would. I still think it's intimidating to see loads of people cheerfully revising away and smilingly walking into the exam room. Also intimidating is the fucking bright spark who asks for another answer booklet less than an hour into the exam when you've written about 4 sides at best! Why allow that? Why not just pile a load of answer booklets on each desk and tell students that's their lot?

10:00, Turn your papers over now.................oh shit......

Later, GJ

Same old, same old

Click to enlarge the piccie.

With thanks to a like minded friend,Au Revoir, GJ

Une lettre de la France

Halfway through my early winter break at The Money Pit and I've finally relaxed. To call the outward journey a bit challenging might be understating things a bit. Leaving home at 5 in the evening on Saturday I had been warned that the weather might be a bit ....shall we say.......blowy? Arriving at Dover in good time as planned at 8 I was then duly informed that the boat was delayed by 90 minutes.

Hmmm...not a good start as the idea of getting there at 8, some 2 hours before departure was to make sure I was on nice and early and picking the best spot in the lounge to get a couple of hours shut eye in before the long haul down the length of France through the night. This news meant 3.5 hours in the embarkation area, which didn't sound like fun.

It wasn't - especially in light of the fact that the cafe area was pretty rank and by this time the wind was at 50mph and the rain pretty much horizontal. Miserable in other words. Living near Portsmouth I usually go from there to Le Havre but Dover to Dunkerque was half the price and as I was travelling 'sans famille' I decided to try a different way.

Never again. It's 127 miles to Dover from Chez Jack, so you've done over 2 hours on the road before getting on the boat. From Dunkerque to The Money Pit is 657 miles and the older you get the harder it is to do that in one go. Bones and joints complain. Eyes play tricks. Muscles cramp up. At Dover I seriously thought about turning round and going back home, but as I was effectively transporting half of Argos and B&Q down to The Money Pit, I had to persevere.

In the end the boat was delayed by 4.5 hours! Which meant I'd been sat there for 6.5 hours in a steamed up car unable to get a decent radio signal or lay down and get some kip due to the load. Oh, and by the way, Norfolkline did not give us one single update during that time. SeaFrance on the other hand carried on merrily sailing away, as did P&O.

Ever had the feeling that things are against you? Well, in Dover I tried to lay across the driver and passenger front seats, hoping for some solace in sleep until someone decided whether or not we sailed. Whilst doing this I sat on my brand new 12v socket doubler allowing me simultaneous use of Sat nav and Dab Radio. Not anymore. Then at the first Peage, instead of doing as I'd planned and getting out of the car and walking round to pay I decided to stay dry and as I moved back into the drivers seat my shoulder hit the rear view mirror and it popped out of its socket. 600 miles with no rear view mirror was not the best experience of my life! The weather in Northern France was as bad if not worse, and the rain so bad I couldn't see the white lines in the road. From 05:30 until 07:30 (sunrise) my top speed was 40mph. i really wanted to go home at this point. I was driving the yellow Leon which saved our lives a few weeks back - so being a typical bloke had decided to be 13 years old and pretend I was test piloting a new aircraft. Well, it kept me going! Shortly after the mirror debacle a yellow warning light appeared on the dash. Apparently I have tyre pressure indicators! I decided after a cursory look, like any good pilot, that the error was a fault in the warning light and not the tyre. I carried on regardless.

Off the boat at 05:30, arrived at The Money Pit at 16:30! 11 of the hardest hours driving I've ever done and barring the journey home, not a trip I'll repeat, not on my own at least.

Anyway, after 2 days of unpacking and testing new Money Pit gadgets, hanging pictures, making the beds for Hellsbells when she arrives to open up in April (more bedding and towels here than a branch of Debenhams!), the revision has started although as feared it is bloody dull. The weather until today has been warm and sunny with a little high cloud. Today it was cold and rainy until about 6 when it cleared again. Sitting outside a little bar in the village square in the balmy evening sun, watching the world go by seems to have been the clinching proof that at last I have a couple of days to read and rest.

Fingers crossed for some Gallic peace and quiet.

Au Revoir, GJ.

Later All

Well, I'm off to France tomorrow in my lovley little yellow car, all refreshed and back from the car hospital. I'm back on the 13th when my exam happens and then after that I'll be back to ranting and pontificating best........free prescription charges for Northern Ireland but NOT England? Same for Scotland and Wales..........grrrrrrr. A father kills his 2 year old son and himslef to 'save his son from pain of broken familty'....WTF? the list goes on!

Back soon with new empty and open mind......

Later, GJ