nineveh_uk

I was supposed to be posting a short fic, but haven’t managed to finish it yet because I can’t think of an ending – that’s the problem with little sketches that don’t have anything behind them. Instead I shall spare you an account of last night’s dreams (I was in a ski race. The fact that there was no snow seemed not to be a problem), and move on to note that after a lengthy hiatus I have returned to my Bible reading and can see why I gave up half-way through Proverbs. Still, I like this one as another example of “Bible people are just like people”:

Proverbs 27, 14: He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.

It’s not just the passive-aggressive blessing that amuses me, but that it was a common enough problem that it was worth cursing. I have mixed feelings about Ecclesiastes, which does indeed have a large amount of recogniseable quotes of the “where are the snows of yesteryear” variety, but also a lot amount of repetition and occasional leaps into “and women are all evil whores who lead to hell”, although both of these are pretty much occupational hazards of reading the Old Testament, which taken as a whole (OK, the first 550 pages, I have 200 to go) is (a) dreadfully edited and (b) screamingly misogynistic. Chapter 12, with its portent of doom followed by incongruous and possibly interpolated cheery final verses strike me as rather like the end of The Seafarer.

Next up The Song of Solomon, which is good because I have read it before and it is very short, followed by Isaiah, which I haven’t read and which is very long, though with many famous bits in it.

I spent an hour on Saturday sewing, and listening to the Afternoon Play on Radio 4.It was the sort of thing that Radio 4 does so well and so badly. It wasn’t about the Bevin boys, or mining, or cultural change in north-east England. It was a very thing tale of a young upper-middle class chap who briefly found himself in an unexpected situation, got used to it, and then went on with the rest of his life. The whole setting was merely detail to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. Confirmation of this came towards the end in one of the modern sections in which the noble savage – sorry, miner’s – great-grandchild was called Kylie. Because whilst a bit of dignity might be afforded to workers in wartime, clearly their descendents are culture-less chavs. I must be fair, though – it had a pretty unpleasant attitude to our upper-middle class insurance broker, too, when you dug into it, and I won’t even start on its portrayal of women. So on the whole, I am glad I listened to it as a fascinating example of a particular brand of snobbery.

That said, for sheer “Was this written by someone on this planet”, nothing will ever beat “Working-class Harrogate girl goes to Trinity (Cantab) to read Classics, her tutor is a lesbian who tries to seduce her with Sappho, is rebuffed and then threatens that student isn’t really very good and will be lucky to scrape a Third, but heroine is saved by the nice Eton boy who helped carry her luggage on the first day.”

I am now 1/20 of the way through the Bible by page-count, not counting the Apocrypha (because they are in a separate volume, though I shall be reading them). Joseph and his coat turns out to have a few details that weren’t mentioned at school (though we were bang on about him being the sort of little brother anyone would want out of the way. The Chalet girls would have had something to say on the subject of tale-bearing for a start). First the not-evil nature of Reuben, second the brain-dead nature of Jacob and family (Joseph: Say that you are cattle herders. The Egyptians hate shepherds. Pharaoh: What do you lot do, then? Jacob and co: We’re shepherds.), and third that Joseph took advantage of a famine to pinch one-fifth of the nation’s land for Pharaoh (so presumably the people can now produce less food), then when everyone is starving, gives them corn first for money, then for their cattle, then for enslaving themselves. Whilst giving lots of land to his family. This is not the only instance at which I am murmuring to myself that I can really see why certain groups of right-wingers love Genesis. Meanwhile the Lord at the beginning of Exodus is behaving a lot like Terry Pratchett’s Om, and the KJV is continuing to have the slash problem of lots of unidentified hims and hes.

And now to be really controversial, Susan Boyle is a more than passable singer, but by no means a great one.