The Smell of Bangor Bangers

I thought I’d take some time off blogging but this Easter has turned into a nightmare. Somebody has lit a barbecue in the garden beneath my apartment and they’re now playing the new Take That album for the fifth time this morning. Say what you like about religion’s part in world conflicts, human suffering, and the oppression of billions of people, but at least it’s a force for peace and quiet on holy days.

I’m afraid I’m not filled with much faith in human beings today. I bought Gabby an expensive Thornton’s chocolate egg and got something hand painted and hard boiled in return. It’s wonderfully authentic and traditional and all that, but it’s hardly Black Magic. It was a terrible thing to think. Now I look on it, I can see the care that Gabby has put into it. It’s a one of kind.

In his Easter service, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor accuses us of living in a ‘now’ culture, where we expect things ‘almost instantaneously’. The problem with instantaneous is that it tends to forgo the pleasure of depth. We don’t appreciate depth, these days.

I’ve also been stuck reading the Sunday papers and the news that the British sailors are to sell their stories. It fills me with mild curiosity. What in their stories is worth reading? Where is the depth? A hostage crisis that lasts a few days lack all the psychological interest of those that lasted years. How is Faye Turney altered by her time in captivity? If, as they’ve told us so far, they were kept in solitary confinement, what is there left to say? One hundred thousand pounds seems a bit much, even for heart-warming tales of how they befriended their jail cell’s resident cockroach and called it Barney.