Joy And Fun Are Fucking Killing Me ✑ Act XXVI

Michael Praetorius ✒ with the twenty sixth in his satirical series.

Heinous news

Someone has unfriended me on Facebook ... !

Because I'm not sad enough to have memorised who my friends are, and even though I've only a handful anyway, I can't work out who the unfriender is.

It wasn't you, was it? I asked Jean.

Jean takes a lot for granted. When she and I got together, my poor mother as good as wore out her Rosary beads, beseeching the Blessed Virgin to find me a Catholic woman.

Don't shack up with another flag hag, she pleaded, not after what happened last time ... !

At her invitation the Parish Priest came round one evening.

Look me in the eye, Michael, he said, and tell me man to man that you honestly don't believe Jaffas to be the Devil's spawn ...

I was still a practising Catholic back then, and keeping it clean. I hadn't needed to attend Confession in over four years, so negligible were my transgressions.

Yet, within 6 months of meeting Jean, and listening to her anti-faith rants, and witnessing her amoral societal callousness, I lapsed into existentialist nihilism, sarcasm, bribery, blackmail and deceit ...

As he lay dying

I was walking past the Scott Polar Research Institute, the other day, on my way to the station in Cambridge, and I couldn't help but think of the look on the stupid old man’s face that last night in the tent.

Fucking motorised sledges! Useless! I said to him. Fucking ponies! Useless! Just because Shackleton used them! Too fucking inept even to train the dogs properly! Then killing and eating Oates rather than fucking eat the dead dogs! Bringing fucking Bowers even though the tent only holds four!

Scott looked up rather crossly and said, Do you mind, old boy? Wilson and I are writing farewells here. I myself have over sixty letters to do before dying.

Wilson nodded in agreement; incorrigibly sycophantic, aloof little twat.

Scott gave me his 'heroic' thousand yard stare. For God's sake, he said, look after our people.

I pulled up the hood of my Burberry and stepped outside. Bit of a white out, but I put the head down in the direction of One Ton Depot; plenty of tuck there, and I knew it was only ten miles away.

I'd gone only a mile or two when I bumped into Apsley 'Blind Owl' Cherry-Garrard, who had set out with a dog team and supplies from Hut Point in McMurdo Sound, to meet us.

He had lost his glasses in a blizzard and didn't know what he was doing or, indeed, where he was.

Is the Skipper still alive back there? he asked.

He's in one of his martyr moods, I said. Better leave him to it.

Right, said the Blind Owl, let's head back to Hut Point for some hoosh and a few bevvies.

We climbed on the sledge, the dogs turned around and away we went. Here's a photograph of me back at base that night, after a few jars, showing the others what it's like to be at the South Pole. I never saw that disorganised arsehole Scott again.

Gap cap

I seldom speak about it, but my gap year was spent in Communist Poland. At that time General Wojciech Jaruzelski was First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party, and thus de facto leader of the Polish People's Republic.

I was in a Warsaw pub one evening, and tribune of the people, Lech Wałęsa, was expounding on the evils of all things Red. In the discussion afterwards I had the nerve to ask him if being under the heel of Ivan was really any worse than being under the heel of a Catholic totalitarianism, which, I said, would be the end result of any revolution in that superstitious, war weary, and benighted place.

Well, the old fraud (and Secret Service agent) has never yet contacted me to admit just how right I was. I mean, it's even worse there now than Ireland back in Dev's good old days.

Anyway, that's all by the way. The main thing is that my gap year job was on the Polish railways, in a ticket office. We were all given these caps (see photograph) as part of our uniform. I still have mine. Jean refuses to be seen with me when I wear it, which is unfortunate, since I believe it to be rather fetching.

Furthermore, she doesn't understand how steeped in history these caps are. For instance, as Orlando Figes notes in his monumental history, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, everyone who participated in that Bolshevik triumph wore such a cap as they wrecked the place and took out the opposition and anybody else in the way. That cap was a badge of honour.

Oddly enough though, Uncle Joe, who was in there gouging with the best of them, but when he came to power, had the cap airbrushed out of all his earlier photographs, and never publicly wore one again. Ostensibly, he claimed, this was so that the proletariat could all the better see his lovely silver-white, benign uncle type hair. Not true however. Turns out, as detailed by Simon Sebag Montefiore in his Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, his wife was just like Jean, and couldn't stop laughing if he put it on.

Won’t get fooled again

Carlingford is the Irish equivalent of one of those North Korean 'show' towns. A bit of money has been spent to try to fool tourists, and the outside world, into thinking the whole country is like it. But we all know that elsewhere the real Ireland is still just grinding poverty, paedophile priests, and Garda barracks like the one John McGahern wrote a novel about, and that appallingly vacuous, 'mature', easy-listening crap music put out by the likes of Mary Black.

Our visit there today began badly. On hearing me call to Miss Lotte Lenya in my Northern accent, a passing Garda told me that he, and everyone else in the Republic, will never rest until every last vestige of Unionism is obliterated from the 'Six Counties', and every Prod packed off back to Scotland. Those weren't his exact words. His exact words were, That's a beauty of a spaniel you have there, what age would she be ... ?

But I know this crowd too well, and I caught his true drift straightaway, and told him to eff away off. Those weren't my exact words. I actually said, You have a spaniel yourself maybe ... ? You could tell he got my real message though, for in a last desperate attempt to prevent me seeing him for the Papal stooge he really is, and instead of whipping out a handgun (as our trusty PSNI lads up here would), he produced his mobile phone and showed me a photograph of his Springer spaniel.

Lovely dog, I said. But he knew from my tone that I had the measure of him and his awful bigotry all right ...

Table talk chez Praetorius

Listen, I said to Jean, the trouble with you is that you over think everything. Fretting, fussbudgeting and fixating. Analysis, anomie and angst. It's all being and nothingness with you, whereas I'm entirely non-being and somethingness ...

Another thing, I said, my faith journey was torpedoed by the fact that my sister is lesbian. The parish priest took me aside one morning after Mass, and told me it's in the genes, and he didn't want me around the place when I went 'homo', as he put it ...

Fenian bastard

Albert Einstein on the 'Marching Season' and 'Ulster':

That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilisation ought to be abolished with all possible speed.

One day in the life of Ivan Michael Praetoriovich

16 January

Woke up. Got out of bed. Put on my cap.

Bloody freezing here, and practically no grub for breakfast.

Shovel thrown at me. Ordered to continue digging out the White Sea Canal until nightfall. If you ask me, the Supreme Engineer hasn't made it deep enough, but what would I know ... ?

Saw Solzhenitsyn just before lights out. He says there's a book in this.

Still freezing. Still hungry.

Took my cap off. Went to bed.

Good girl ... !

It's not well known, but Miss Lotte Lenya is a Bachelor of Divinity (BDiv). You won't be surprised to hear that, notwithstanding the fact that she can't read, write or talk, she got a First and was third from top of her class.

But for humans, Divinity has always been, and remains, the only option for those so stupid as to be turned down even for Media Studies or Outside Broadcasting.

Hats off to the IRFU ... !

In August 2022, the IRFU said only rugby players whose sex was recorded as female at birth would be allowed to compete in the female category.

Do you remember when that piece of common sense wasn't hate speech, genocidal and worse than the Holocaust ... ? Aye, we all do, but can no longer say so.

And, therefore, Ulster Rugby will be banned from this year's Gay Pride parade.

The slogan this time is Stand By Your Trans, although what transgender rights have to do with gay rights - other than revealing a nasty streak of homophobia among many trans 'activists' - is anyone's guess.

Just asking. But homosexuals are still fiercely abused in many Muslim communities and countries. You'd wonder why the ideologues of Stonewall say nothing about that, preferring to devote themselves to trans affairs ...

Of course a question like that is simply transphobic and Islamophobic ...

Hats off to the impartial BBC ... !

According to Auntie, Maya Forstater 'believes' that biological sex is immutable. Like as if that isn't a fact, just an opinion. Like as if when you say the earth is round (pear shaped actually), it's just something you 'believe', not necessarily a fact; and the contrary view that the earth's flat is entirely legitimate, and very possibly even true ...

Furthermore, Auntie BBC, still fiercely neutral, tells us that J K Rowling has 'courted controversy' by echoing Forstater's 'beliefs'. This is something of a surprise, since the statement of scientific fact has hitherto been simply the statement of ... er ... scientific fact.

For example: the earth is round; apples fall downwards; snowflakes are made of ice; and so on. I hadn't realised that by saying such things I am courting controversy, because there are some people out there who may passionately and personally feel, and thereby have proved, for example, that snowflakes are not actually made of ice at all ...

Boys-a-dear, we live, once more, in the days of miracles and wonder ...

Hats off to peace and love ... !

Mad mullah wows Glastonbury ... !

King of peace and spirituality. Cat Stevens. Composer of Peace Train.

Called for fatwa on Salman Rushdie to be carried out ASAP. Never retracted statement. Never apologised.

No need to insult the prophet, he said, so die, blasphemer ... !

Cat Stevens doesn't exist. In his place we have a murder-inciting bigot, Yusuf Stalin. An unreconstructed hypocrite.

Climb aboard his peace train he says.

Abuse victim speaks out

Here I am ... on top of some mountain* or other ... Because I'm old now, but still haven't the sense not to run myself ragged within ten minutes when we're out in the middle of nowhere, Michael occasionally forces me to sit still for a few minutes. He says it’s to calm me down and save a little energy ... But it's really just because he's afraid he wouldn't have the strength to carry me back to the car if I ran out of steam ...

Nevertheless, it's definitely abuse ...

[*Slieve Foye actually]

⏩Michael Praetorius spent his working life in education and libraries. Now retired, he does a little busking in Belfast . . . when he can get a pitch. He is TPQ's fortnightly Wednesday columnist.