The Bible is fairly doctrinaire on the matter of unnecessary noise being made in church, though annoyingly it has less to say concerning the same problem in cinemas. “As in all the churches of the saints,” it is written in Corinthians 14, “the women should keep silence, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says.” A statement that reminds us the Bible was written long before the advent of Bacardi Breezers or George Clooney in ER.
More than ever, we live in an age of rudeness and public boorishness, an age when not even God’s house is free from auditory interference, which is surprising considering how many mansions God’s house is rumoured to possess. The problem has made some people as mad as hell, in the most Christian fashion possible, and their frustrations have been vented on a website that names and blames places of worship particularly prone to parishioner coughing, spluttering and all-purpose acoustic unholiness, most of which is the product of churches becoming stops on tourist trails rather than places where people go to ask God to forgive all the ox-coveting they’ve been up to.
Previously the giant finger of shame had emerged from the heavens to indicate churches in Charlottetown, Canada, and Washington DC. This week, however, the Noisy Parish Awards website (slogan: “Shhh, I’m praying”) identified its first British recipient, St Andrew’s Cathedral in Glasgow, where Satan himself manifested in the admittedly novel shape of two women wheeling some revolving book carousels into position.
“I honestly cannot describe the racket they made,” wrote one complainer. “A unique combination of high-pitched squeak, dull thud and some sort of slapping noise.”
This sin was compounded by what the Good Book describes as vague muttering: “You know that thing people do when they think they’re whispering, but in effect they’re just mumbling in a lower tone of voice?” the correspondent wonders. “It shattered the stillness. Wouldn’t it be great if people could realise that others are in church other than to get out the way of the buses?” The Bible tells us, however, that God loves bus-avoiders too, or chariot-avoiders as it would have been in His day, and that sometimes He might just move book carousels in the mysterious ways for which He is so well known.
- The Edinburgh International Book Festival, as most of us are coming to suspect, will soon prove merely a fine-tuning warm-up for what’s certain to become the main event of Scotland’s literary year, the Hebridean Book Festival, which ran all this week at the An Lanntair Arts Centre. While the Edinburgh copycat has to struggle by with such minor also-rans as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith, the Stornoway festival was able to pull out the real big hitters of the literary firmament: John Randall, Kevin MacNeil and Murdo Macfarlane, the man we all know and love, apparently, as the Melbost Bard. The louche and raffish ways of the literary world are hardly the first we associate with Stornoway, Calvinist capital of the western world, but Stornoway is so determined to make a success of its festival it has already sorted out next year’s, which includes:
Jackie Collins’s literary workshop: the steamy novelist will tell readers how she crafts her famously racy books and will read several extracts from her latest title, Lapdance, in which a devout free church minister confronts the agonising temptation of having his underwear made from a slightly less scratchy kind of wool.
Something for the ladies: the acclaimed chick-lit novelist Penny Singleton, 36, unveils her latest novel, Meeting Mr Right, in which a 36-year-old PR executive forsakes her jet-set lifestyle to set up home with a Lutheran outreach worker on the isle of Vatersay.
The Calvin code: the local author Murdo McMurdo reads from his debut novel, a thriller in which Biblical scholars find the Holy Grail beneath a mysterious and elaborate croft.
- Fighting its way back to the frontline of relevance, the Scottish Socialist party resurfaced to make a pointed attack on the chancellor that fell calamitously to earth while bystanders guffawed uproariously.
Colin Fox, the party’s convenor, queried this week whether Gordon Brown had paid Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’s controversial £10-a-day parking charge while visiting recently for the birth of his second child.
Fox’s logic clearly was that as Brown isn’t in the Scottish Socialist party, he therefore gets to enjoy a life of privilege and preference, unlike Fox and his comrades, who have to make a single donkey jacket last the best part of a decade. The health minister, Andy Kerr, looked into the matter and reported: “NHS Lothian advise me that parking charges were not waived for Gordon Brown”, whereupon the socialists did some tuneless whistling and skulked away.
It’s good to have them back.
- I once had a landlord named Smellie, a cheerful chap who also happened to be a GP, meaning that his full professional appellation must have made his patients feel as though they were visiting a character from an episode of Sesame Street. I’ve also known a McSporran, a Nutter and one particularly unfortunate girl whose surname was Govan, one of the least fragrant areas in the British Isles. Being named myself after the colour of mud, I’ve often wondered how others can bear to live with truly awful surnames.
The answer, according to the University of Central London, is the knowledge that there’s a long lineage of other sufferers behind them, some of Britain’s worst surnames having a long and noble attachment to a particular area.
“Most names have a precise geographic origin,” said the researcher Pablo Mateos, “and can be mapped by following historic migration patterns.”
As soon as Mateos works out where the Govans migrated from, we’ll have a large piece of the puzzle.
Caley race Celtic for pole positioning
“Football is about nothing unless it’s about something,” the late Peter Cook once joked, “and what it’s about is football.” Not always, though. The conventional model for supporting a football team is that fans tend to gather gradually over a number of years, drawn by geographic convenience and regional pride. In thrusting, tomorrow-today Inverness, however, the urgent go-getters have no time for such old-fashioned methods and prefer to go directly for the jugular, lobbying the city’s large number of Polish immigrants to bestow their loyalty on Inverness Caledonian Thistle. The team has taken to advertising its games in the local newspaper both in English and Polish in the hope that some of the area’s 5,000 Slavic incomers will forsake their vodka and gloomy meditations and get themselves along to Caley’s Tulloch Stadium ground every fortnight. At present competition for Polish support is split with Celtic, whose goalie, Artur Boruc, and striker, Maciej Zurawski, are Poles. But given that Caley famously ejected Celtic from the Scottish Cup several years back and held them to a draw last month, there seems little reason for the Poles not to devote themselves to Caley unstintingly.
