OVER AND OUT on DAMIAN'S BLOG

Geezer (not totally blind, though it looks that way) and three legged best friend: Burgos, March 28th, 2010

A longer, probably boring entry today. Only the very interested in Patrick personally (if any such exist, apart from wife and family) need bother reading.

Good Friday is a good day for reflection on one's sins. Too much foolish fun is a cardinal one of mine. Repentance, therefore, here and now.

For a couple of weeks now, while Reb has been Caminoing, I have been following and posting entries, on Damian Thompson's blog in the Telegraph.

I stumbled on it casually at first and was entranced. Damian, and many of his regular contributors are Conservative Catholics it is safe to say.
They yearn for the good old days - before Vatican 2 - when the mass was in Latin and purple-faced priests roared from the pulpits fulminating about the horrors of birth control to packed congregations of potato-faced Irish labourers with stony-faced wives and herds of sullen, lumpen, offspring. Bing Crosby was oiling his way through 'The Bells of Saint Marys, and 'Going My Way,' Barry Fitzgerald sidekicked as a vicious, embittered old bigot with a Heart of Gold (strangely and prophetically channeling the current Pope), typewriter mechanics were in high demand and MEN WERE MEN, not a bloody gang of pansies in tight trousers.

Damian's deranged devotees deplore, not only Vatican 2, but also the Enlightenment, and probably the Renaissance, as well.

To discover that all this was still, if not alive and kicking, at least even moribund, was interesting and more importantly, amusing to me.

So I joined in the fun, introducing a few conceits of my own. One such was that Damian, judging from his photo - was a nine-year old leprechaun that had blundered into a coven. Harmless enough, and maybe even gave the unfortunate lad a wan smile.

All this amiable idiocy might have gone on for weeks more - at least until Reb returned from Santiago and reclaimed the computer for grown-up stuff.

But Providence works, etc, etc.

A past acquaintance, and (so he tells me) veteran Damian blogger, has rejoined the fiesta. As ever, full of lamentations about the terrible state of practically everything these days. Filth and obscenity everywhere - represented on the Blog, no doubt, by me.

Dogs with insufficient legs allowed to roam Spain unmolested, Catholics all capering about the Vatican in brocade-fringed chasubles, 'desperate' sad, atheists discharging their jealous spleen at cheerful, chirpy Christians..

Well my old sparring partner is bang on, and I would thank him from the bottom of my heart if I had one.

Deboot the computer. Back to the books.
Back to Montaigne, Voltaire, Sartre, Camus, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien - and, yea even Pascal and Kierkegaard.

Goodbye to all that other god-ridden gallimaufry.

Still, my stint in Damian's humbug mine did expand my vocabulary a bit. I learned what a thurible is, (a smouldering tin handbag) and what a chasuble is, (a pope's frock) Good to know in these Vatican-voguish days.

Reb says to point out that I am not abandoning my own blog. Which will be back Sunday with 'Cav!'