Lately, as you may have noticed, I’ve been a bit reticent about writing anything of substance on this blog. (Graham, you’ve never written anything of substance on this blog. Sincerely yours, The World.) Mainly it’s through fear of saying something ridiculous, which these days isn’t so much a risk as a given, but now that my neglectful behaviour has shaken my readership down to about four people, I’ve realised that it doesn’t matter what I say anymore. This page gets fewer hits than Chris de Burgh these days, and doesn’t even have the halcyon era of Missing You to dine out on.
This post, of course, won’t break the ‘substance’ barrier either. I still have nothing to say. I could plug The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, out on October 1st, but I’m guessing that anyone looking at this already knows about it. Probably more than I do, since I haven’t got round to reading it yet. But, just in case you don’t, it’s a compendium of 41 contributions written by intelligent and prominent atheists, and one fairly dull contribution written by a lanky dullard. The dextrous application of a craft knife on page 277, however, will remove the latter and turn a tainted tome into a perfect present. Order it now for the valuetastic price of £8.44 from a quaint little online retailer called Amazon.
In other news, I have been writing my Last Will and Testament. I have no particular reason to expect my life to conclude in the near future, but it’s one of those things you can keep putting off and then regret when you’re being clubbed to death by a well meaning but overly officious car park attendant. I can recommend it, it’s fun – deciding how much money to give people, which of your manky possessions to bestow upon bewildered new guardians, and stipulating non-religious funeral directions in bold upper case to avoid embarrassing choruses of How Great Thou Art as your cardboard coffin awaits interment. I’m not sure how specific you’re allowed to be, though. Would it be inappropriate, for example, to insist that everyone wears a clown wig?
“Look, I’m not wearing the fucking wig. End of story. He was only joking.”
“It’s his dying wish!”
“Do they make them in black?”
“No, it clearly states that fluorescent pink, orange or green are the only admissible colours.”
“Whatever. I’m only wearing mine for the shortest time possible.”
“So is this a bad time to mention the make-up?”
I’ve been pretty busy with other stuff too, but nothing that warrants a mention.
Incidentally, if you’re only reading this because you searched for Chris de Burgh, I’m sorry that you’ve been misguided. In both senses.
