Well I did acknowledge from the start that it was a bad idea. I panicked, mid-December, into starting an ill-judged and ill-conceived project that lost its legs a few weeks back. I'm on a seemingly unending search for the right vehicle to showcase my tal***s, ever mindful that my inability to find it could merely indicate something I'd rather not acknowledge.
So thank you, the merry few who remain - I'm off to come up with a more productive use for my time.
A couple of weeks ago a strange thing happened and I still haven't come up with a satisfying explanation for it. I was having my usual Saturday lie-in when I was awoken by a huge thud on my doormat followed by the rattle of my letter plate and the postman's steps down the metal staircase outside. Now, I'm a very sound sleeper who can normally snooze through thunderstorms, car alarms, air raids, you name it. So whatever had just dropped through my letterbox must have been pretty substantial. I was still sleepy but since I wasn't expecting any packages I was very intrigued as to what it might be, so I got out of bed immediately to see what it was. When I got to the doormat there was an A4 flyer for a local double glazing firm. Nothing else. I thought perhaps I'd dreamt it; the leaftlet had probably been there from earlier. But on looking out of the window, the postman was walking across the road to the other houses. Please readers, help me understand.
Look what I found in an old, dusty drawer! For a mad moment last week I was thinking about getting one of those iPad things but now I don't have to.
And yes, that really is a full stop. This sentence of tedium is finally over.
From here on in I will be relaxing* my intention to rigidly observe sentence case because it's too restrictive. In typographical terms, avoiding capital letters severely limits your options and since I'm struggling a bit already I could do without such constraints. There's no emphasis in the story anyway so it doesn't really matter.
* That is, totally abandoning
I've just got wind of a peculiar campaign that The British Humanist Association are running regarding the forthcoming census. They have called it The Census Campaign. Its sole aim is to get people who are not religious to declare that they are not religious. Yep, that's it. They are trying to raise £15,000 to promote the importance of telling the truth. It's just as well that I discovered this campaign when I did, or I might have accidentally declared myself a Hindu. Good work, BHA! Remarkably though, as I write this in late February, they have almost reached their fundraising target.
The BHA's claim is that people who are not religious still tend to classify themselves as having faith, when asked pick from a list, due to some kind of familial loyalty or because they've been baptised. This gives a religion a greater share of the spoils than it deserves, encouraging those who govern us to believe that we're all good churchgoers whose views should be strongly represented in all areas of society. Damn, where's AV when you need it?
Personally I'm not bothered. The census is hardly the front line of battle and besides, if people feel the need to declare themselves Christian despite only setting foot in church for weddings and funerals, let them. If they were truly non-religious, they wouldn't need a crappy poster to tell them so.
And it really is a crappy poster. The Census Campaign artwork is abysmal. They're still clinging to the corpse of the Atheist Bus Campaign like a child in denial dragging around a dead puppy. I hope no one thinks I had anything to do with it. I'm sure the BHA do some good things from time to time but this isn't one of them. It's a scary recruitment drive worthy of Jehovah's Witnesses.
