Bish, Bash, Tosh! (Folk Myths of a PC Christmas)

My interest was peeked this weekend by a shouty article in Birmingham's leading tabloid:

"Midlands Church Leaders in Battle to Save Christmas" screamed the headline. The article itself is no less polemic, announcing it as a gauntlet thrown down to "The Politically Correct Brigade" (whoever they are).

The Mercury quotes the bishop at length...

"We’re just getting to the season when the papers like to report on local councils who, out of concern for ethnic minorities, have banned Christmas in favour of Winterval or another silly name.

This year that kind of story is likely to be more than matched by stories of big firms sacking those people who want to wear a cross, a fish lapel badge or some other sign of the Christian faith.

Ethnic minorities are far more anxious about the rampant secularism and commercialism that erodes all Christian standards than they are about their host country properly celebrating its Christian foundations."

(Read the rest of it here http://www.lichfield.anglican.org/news&newsID=655)

Now I'm not arguing against the good bishop's right to express his fears but there are two phrases which need highlighting in the above paragraph.

"the papers like to report..." and "that kind of story is likely to be more than matched by...". It hasn't actually happened you see?

Trying to find an actual example of a local authority or a company banning Christmas is as difficult as trying to find a Muslim who's offended by cheap plastic baubles and borrowed pagan symbols. It's like trying to nail jelly to a wall, but the idea persists that they're all at it.

The Chronicle warns "it comes as a report reveals three out of four employers will not be putting up decorations this year for fear of offending staff."

I wanted to read that report, so I went looking for it. It was conducted by an employment law firm which deals with compensation claims against employers. Oh and it was done in 2006.

Despite the decrepit and potentially biased nature of the stats and the paucity of other proof, the Chronicle (and the Bishop) have responded as though the sky is falling, while Muslims and other minority faiths respond with utter bewilderment.

The "Winterval" scare is also an urban myth. Back in 1997 and 1998 Birmingham City Council came up with an idea to promote the redevelopment of it's city centre to everyone. What it wanted to do was include a whole grab-bag of celebrations without making anyone think it was just about Christmas. Among the events between October 20th and mid-January it wanted to celebrate were such foreign muck as; The Christmas lights switch on, BBC Children in Need, Aston Hall by Candlelight, New Years eve, various theatre shows, an open air ice rink, Frankfurt open air Christmas market and "the Christmas seasonal retail offer".

Fortunately for the headline writers, the Hindu Diwali festival, Chinese New Year and the Muslim festival of Eid ul-Fitr were also included. Knee-jerkers will often call Eid "Muslim Christmas" but it moves forward 11 days each year so most of the time it's nowhere near the Christian festival. Not in 1997 and 1998 though. Then it was slap bang in the middle. A perfect chance to make money off Muslims and Christians alike, not to mention BBC viewers and Torville and Dean fans. But the authority made the mistake of using one of those public service words which has the effect of turning tabloid hacks into rabid attack dogs. That word is "Inclusive".

What started off as a marketing ploy to get more punters in to the town centre on dark winter nights swiftly spiralled into a national tabloid sensation, as editors scrambled to gain the high ground of moral indignation on what was always a hill of sand.

Commentators raged at "Political correctness gone mad" but consider this; If I go and ask a bishop the two following questions (as a qualified journalist) which do you think is going to get a more explosive response?

Q1) Birmingham City council wants to rename Christmas "Winterval" to avoid offending Muslims. What do you think?

Q2) Birmingham city council wants to get as much money as possible off everyone this Christmas so it's calling its major marketing event Winterval so it can include adverts for Diwali, Eid, Dancing on Ice and Children In Need. What do you think?

Guess which angle the papers went for? Here's a clue; The Sunday Mercury, bastion of fine editorial content that it is, has such gems as "Stourbridge widow was £1,000 per night hooker" and "Britain's Got Talent star offers sex for money" on it's front page this week. Incisive stuff.

The Winterval story was just too good for them to miss. 12 years on it's still running. "A lie", they say, "will be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on".

So I'm sorry to be a wet blanket on everyone's righteous anger but this is a tabloid inspired circulation booster.

A combination of lazy journalism and partisan paranoia have conspired to bring another non-story back from the dead. It is truly a ghost of Christmas past.

You've been had. Again.

Thought for the day: How many people who use the Coca-Cola company's image of Santa, hang pagan mistletoe in the hall and fight for a Christian Christmas have been to church in the last 12 months?

Dying to be green

I'll not bore you with the thought process which lead me to my current conundrum but it occurred to me that my death, when it comes, will have an impact on the planet's atmosphere if I'm not very careful. We're all destined for landfill of sorts after all. Before your eyebrows migrate to the nape of your neck, this began more as a thought experiment than an eco-crusade.

Put simply, we're 18% carbon as we stand, but when we lie down to sleep for the last time it'll all be released as we rot. I'm only 11 stone so that's one run to the shops in a Fiat Panda in Co2 terms but there are an awful lot of us around. 7 Billion trips to ASDA worth of rotting corpses is a bit more of a problem.

It's not an easy one to solve either. My first thought was encapsulation. Bury me in Tupperware! But then there's all that oil and water to make the plastic and the inevitable junk male which would come from the production of a click-lock casket (I can see the JML ad now). Ditto glass. All that heat required to make me into a giant paperweight. Concrete, another candidate chucks out huge amounts of carbon dioxide as it sets so that';s an eco-no-no too. Nelson was pickled in brandy to preserve his body for the return trip from Trafalgar (Third class really meant something back then) but again, vineyards, wooden casks, transit costs and the fermentation process are hardly carbon neutral. Cremation's the worst of all. Most of the ovens are natural gas fired and would release my carbon faster than mouldering in the grave.

When you start analysing what makes carbon dioxide it really does get tricky. How do you dispose of a human without the funeral service being drowned out by the tutting of environmentalists.

I have however hit upon a plan which I think you'll agree ticks most of the boxes. I shall plant a rubber tree and harvest the sap until It's time to clock out. It'll bind up C02 itself and the resulting gluey mess can be used to encase my remains upon exit. Thus shrink-wrapped I shall ask to be transported north, by sailing boat of course, to the frozen wastes of the polar ice-cap where bacteria fear to tread. On arrival, dig me a hole. Deep frozen, my carbon should be safe and my neutrality in the cycle quite literally preserved.

Simple as that.

Thought for the day: The amount of Co2 generated by the computers used to compile this blog and for you to read it have made the plan utterly pointless.

With a jerk of the knee...

With a jerk of the knee the cycle is complete. Today’s news contains a perfect example of the modern world’s most infuriating malady. The knee-jerk cycle. The story so far: Two police officers agreed to look after each other’s children while they were on shift, thus saving each other £300 pounds a month. Ofsted says they’re breaking the law because it’s more than two hours at a time and the arrangement is for more than 14 days a year. They could now be prosecuted. Read the full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8277378.stm


The story in itself is not a new one. Charles Dickens was the one who coined the phrase “The law is an Ass” and it stands today. The righteous indignation and calls for the heads of the law makers is all to familiar too. The echoes of “Something must be done” barely have time to fade before the same people cry “Nanny state!”. The Childcare Act which is at the heart of the story was brought in to stop cowboy (or cowgirl) carers abusing children in their care. It was brought in on a wave of public indignation after high profile cases of kids being mistreated by people who’d not been checked. The government, ever seeking to please the illiberal mob, rushed a piece of law to statute and handed it over to non-partisan civil servants to enact. This they have done with gusto. But the mob is fickle. It wanted this law. Now it has it. Now it doesn’t want it.

Consider this hypothetical: An unqualified friend offers to look after a child in exchange for some kindness, walking the dog for instance. The friend takes pictures of your naked child while you’re at work and flogs them to an internet paedophile. When the story hits the papers there are cries of “Something must be done” but of course something has been done; It’s called the childcare act. If Ofsted had failed to act on the breach it would be condemned for not doing its job.

Now, if anyone can tell me how the law could have been differently drafted to allow the two police officers to continue but stop our hypothetical predator I’d be pleased to hear it. In the meantime I’d appreciate it if you could all try and keep your knee relaxed and your foot firmly on the floor.

To the far horizon.

So here it is, a Mallin blog. It's perhaps a symptom of my muddled ideas on blogging that I feel the need to provide a prologue, just like a traditional written format. No one will ever read it perhaps but I feel such a thing deserves a beginning, a proper launch. So permit me a flight of fancy, dear reader. Allow me a little pretence. If an analogy is worth whipping it's worth flogging.
Here she is on the slipway then. Imagine, if you will, a woman with a flowery hat and a name with a hyphen, poised with a bottle of champaign on a rope to christen the bows. In the crowd the general feeling is of anticipation but the riveters know there's a few seams that will only hold with the grace of god, the shipwright himself feels he could have done more to make her seaworthy, and the boilers aren't even connected yet. The majority of the fitting-out won't be done until the keel's wet and after that it'll be too late to bring her back on shore to fix the bits that weren't thought through.  She's a little broad in the beam and likely to roll some in heavy seas. She'll make a few people queasy once she's out of the harbour. There's a sense of occasion nonetheless, even though there are plenty of better ships out there already. She's not even got a mission yet. Carrying coals is more likely than a voyage of discovery, for what's left to discover? The sea level will rise a fraction of a fraction when she's afloat, but that's just displacement folks.
The woman in the hat says "God bless her and all who sail in her" (as so many have said before) and another good bottle of bubbly is sacrificed to superstition. As it bursts someone adds "To the far horizon!" but there are mutters from the old hands that Grimsby is a more likely destination.
Off she goes down the ramp nevertheless, with a patter of applause from the crowd, a shriek of blocks and the sound of a lot of gravity arguing with a lot of inertia.

Thought for the day: The story of the Titanic proved the most important man on a ship is not the captain but the lookout.