Out of the mouths of babes, real religious truth
Sunday 3 January 2016 05.00 EST
Stewart Lee
On 28 December I performed my annual progress around a Midlands motorway triangle, through sluggish bank holiday traffic, to venerate relatives’ graves. My eight-year-old daughter accompanied me, leavening my loneliness, and I made the dutiful day delightful by insisting we listen to Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds in its entirety. Don’t you wish I was your dad?
We enjoyed impersonating the portentous tones of Richard Burton at appropriately banal points in our pilgrimage; “No one would have believed, in the last days of Christmas 2015, the length of toilet queues at Strensham services. And yet, slowly and surely, the desperate motorists drew towards the lavatories.” The day was like an episode of The Trip, but with two Rob Brydons, both of whom could only do Richard Burton.
Between you and me, I have struggled with what Christmas means this year. I dip into the Christian tradition that is my cultural heritage with a yearly mass. And I enjoy Yule ritual that predates the belief system dominant in these islands this last millennium, recently replaced by television, political correctness gone mad, rampant consumerism, and gays.
But inappropriate weather skews the season. Things should bloom in spring. That’s why the church dumped the resurrection on to the festival of the fertility goddess Ostara, giving converts some rebirth-themed continuity.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/03/out-of-the-mouths-of-babes-stewart-lee-nicky-morgan-religious-education
