FraserWords

I popped into Launceston the other day. And very soon popped out again.

Set up in the middle of town on the back of a juggernaut were a bunch of evangelical Christians sharing their good news with the aid of a top-volume soundtrack of soft rap and hip-hop. They were singing about their salvation and urging the scurrying sinners around them to renounce their miserable, sordid lives and join their happy clappy band.

No wonder you don’t hear much about Satanism or the devil these days: who needs Beelzebub when you’ve got this sort of nonsense to drive you to the dark side?

Being a miserable sinner who’s quite fond of some sordid things, I abandoned my plans and fled the scene lest some beaming young person patronise me with their love. I wonder how many others abandoned the shops that day?

I know we live in a democracy, and that’s a great thing, but would fascists be encouraged to stage a Saturday afternoon rock concert in the town centre? Would the town council welcome the likes of me urging everybody to go on strike? Muslims? Jedi knights?

But because I’m perfectly prepared to listen to anybody’s ideas – apart from anybody who wants to praise Margaret Thatcher, obviously, there are limits – I’m not objecting to the right of the Christian to persuade me their path is the path to follow. Nor do I believe the spiritual, reflective life has no use to us in our hurrying, frantic lives.

What I object to is the way they do it, and the sheer triteness and banality of these people: screaming and shouting in cliché, plucking souls from the pavement on a whim, counting it a victory for God if you can add to the number clad in man-made fibres listening to very bad music.

If I want to mend the car I look for a garage; if I want to talk about God I’ll take my own choice about with whom I do so.

Who’s got the top job?

Brother Hamster signposted me to an interesting debate – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17702654: with everybody from teachers to tanker drivers, local authority workers to tube train drivers, taking or threatening industrial action, whose job is the most essential?

As in many things, you don’t turn to the free market for the answer: “You could argue that the people who are most essential are those who are the best paid,” says Dr Tim Leunig, an economic historian at the London School of Economics. “This would mean hedge fund bosses. But that argument is obviously bonkers.”

Is it, then, people who are banned by law from striking – the armed forces, the police, prison officers?

Well, now the armed forces consist of a dozen blokes with 40-year-old kit in a Land Rover being shot at in Afghanistan, an air force pilot in full goggled rig making an Airfix model of the planes he used to fly and two matelots in a rubber dinghy off the seafront at Eastbourne, it’s hard to argue that we couldn’t manage without them.

Cynics could also argue that without the police we’d soon have an unmanageable pile of forms that need filling in, but I’d disagree and suggest Johnny Toerag would soon be knocking in the window of Curry’s if PC Plod did withdraw labour.

Once upon a time the answer was simple: utility workers. Miners, power station operatives. But as so many have signed or voted away their rights to union membership and collective responsibility, or in the case of the Miners Strike had it beaten out of them by the forces of the state, they are largely powerless (pardon the pun) pawns of multinational corporations these days. We’re much more at the merciless whim of the rich people who run the corporations than we ever were at the whim of the unions: just look at any of your recent bills.

So I think you could make a convincing case that supermarket workers are the most important: if they had a union and went on strike, this country would collapse in a hysterical, snivelling heap. You only need look at the queues outside Tesco if there’s a single Bank Holiday on the horizon to see that people really, truly, cannot manage for so much as a single hour without the reassurance that there is a supermarket nearby, ready, willing and able to assist them to pile a few more pounds on their fat arses.

Well, if the likes of me went on strike – you know, writers, musicians, etc – nobody would notice, so I guess the argument is over to you…

On the spot

Well, that’s done religion and politics, so we might as well do sex too. Not so fast, Dr Ding Dong! I meant “we might as well do sex too” figuratively.

I wonder, for starters, whether Launceston Town Council might allow me to stand on the back of a lorry in the town centre extolling the way sex is a force for good that makes you happy and urging everybody passing by to come and join me?

But I mention the topic mainly because of a fine article by Joan Smith in The Independent on the much-vexed issue of the female G-spot.

Now researchers over the past decades have banged on and on – forgive the phrase – about the damned thing: Does it exist? If it does, where the hell is it?

For a long time I’ve wondered why everybody gets so very anxious about the G-spot. I, too, have carried out research into this mysterious centre of pleasure and it puzzles me because women already have a mysterious centre of pleasure. It’s called the clitoris.

Why do we need to worry so much about another one? Isn’t one enough to be going on with? It seems to provide lots of fun and frolic. Put it this way (as it were): I’ve always rather wished I had one too.

And if you’re going to insist that there’s another secret centre of delight: why do women have to have one, or two, or 14, places or caresses that bring them pleasure? Why can’t every woman be different and tell you which bits press the right button (ahem) and which bits do not? Why do women have to be analysed and restricted and explained like a car’s instruction manual?

Which brings us neatly to the point (sorry) that Joan Smith’s article is worth a read because it hits the nail on the head (ding dong): the argument about the G Spot is not an argument about women’s sexual pleasure at all – it’s about enabling men’s.

Here’s the link – http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joan-smith/joan-smith-call-off-the-search-teams–the-gspot-is-a-myth-7679083.html –

Treasure Hunt

And finally…. Am I the only one who’s loving the controversy about culture secretary Jeremy Hunt mainly because every time I hear his name I think of James Naughtie’s famous gaffe on the Today programme, when he referred to him as Jeremy *unt?