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I was talking to my Lithuanian hairdresser the other day and he asked me straight out a question I wasn’t expecting, “do you go to church”?

This, it is fair to say, is a very very unusual question from a hairdresser. From a hairdresser you expect the following kinds of questions:

“Enjoying (or, perhaps more usually, what about this) weather we’ve been having?”

“Going anywhere nice on your holidays?”

“Something for the weekend sir?”

Or if they are particularly feeling risqué, “how long would you like your hair to be at the end of this haircut”?

They are certainly not supposed to ask you anything that sounds remotely like religion or politics. And this question sounded very much like it fell into the first of these categories.

Actually it turned out that he was merely trying to figure out something to talk to me about after I had casually admitted that I hadn’t “seen the big game” which happened to be the world cup. Actually that’s another rich vein of conversation in hairdressers but it’s one that passes me by so I didn’t include it above.*

He had by this point found out that my family is from Russia and was literally wondering if this would mean that we might go to the same church which is, perhaps a different question. I had to tragically disappoint the poor lad by revealing that I don’t go and therefore would see him there. His face dropped and he looked despondent until he remembered a funny story which he then told me.

He was telling me about the very first occasion that he had arrived in the country and after a short time had decided that he’d like to go to church (I suppose to catch up on what God had been up to in the intervening weeks).

He didn’t know where the local Russian orthodox church would be so he decided that the simplest way would be to go into a British church and ask them where it was. So that is what he did. He strolled up to some Anglican church and asked them “where is the nearest Russian Orthodox church?” and the vicar said, “it’s in any small garden” which our hairdresser thought might be a bit deep. It sounded he said like one of those Buddhist things. Like he was saying God is all around us.

But he didn’t want any of this theoretical stuff he wanted to actually go to church so he decided to go to a different Anglican church and a different vicar and ask him instead. And so he asked the vicar and the vicar replied that the Russian Orthodox church was “in any small garden”.

At this point our man decided he wasn’t going to take being messed around like this, he said “no I want to know where the physical church is, I’ve looked in several small gardens and it’s not there. I want to know where it is”.

It was at this point that the vicar smiled that special grin he reserved for dealing with the elderly and the very young and said, “no I’m afraid my son you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. It’s not in Any Small Garden, it’s in a road called Ennismore Gardens.”

* although I did include “Something for the weekend sir?” even though nobody has ever actually said it to me.

In my post on the wrong kind of rain the other day I talked about how water is something that you can’t remove from the system. All other food systems can be broken down you get cows by applying two parent cows to a field and some hay and proving them with some water. And to get the grass they need the grass needs water too. It all comes back to water in the end. Water is axiomatic in a way.

There is another weird cross-over with water too in that it has traditionally been one of the most difficult things to deal with when doing special effects, because it’s the one thing that you can’t miniaturise. You can make an entire town at 100th the size and have a giant stay-puft marshmallow man walk around the city and when you show it on screen it will really look (well almost) like the stay-puft marshmallow man has come to New York. But the same isn’t true with water. To make a load of water run down a city street and look convincing you’ve always had to actually put a whole load of water in a street which is a tad expensive. Because the problem is that when you see some water running in the middle of a miniaturised set you can immediately tell that the water is too big. It just looks wrong, because you can actually tell that it hasn’t been miniaturised. You can see some examples of where they just decided to go with it in such movies as Die Hard 3 and one of the Indiana Jones movies (I can’t remember which).

Now of course cgi has ruined my point because you can shrink the water by the appropriate amount in the computer.

Finally in Britain we’re getting the kind of weather that makes us feel like we deserve the drought orders that we’ve been having. It always feels to me a particularly un-British thing that we aren’t able to collect rain properly. I mean – rain? Rain is kind of what we’re famous for!

But actually we’re famous for invention too and so in many ways we’ve been hoisted by our own petards.* (To see how the umbrella was invented: See
Who invented the cocktail umbrella?)

The thing is that we don’t keep very much of the water that we do collect. Most of it seems to leak away because we were so early with the invention of pipes and water systems these water systems are now starting to look a bit worse for wear.

The worst news is that while we’ve had the driest winter for a million years (or thereabouts) we’ve also had one of the wettest springs. The reason that this doesn’t work out for us is that by the time all of the rain showed up the trees and plants were already in full flow and so they’ve been taking all of our water.

What this tends to mean is that the trees and plants will end up doing really well this year, which in turn will mean that there will be more food for the vegetarian animals which in turn means there will be more food for the carnivore (and omnivore animals) which means that more animals will drink more water which means there will be even less for us.

The only problem is that we’ve detached ourselves from the regular food chain, so the fact that there would be a bumper amount of animals this year which should yield us with more water (meat contains water, and the more bounteous the meat the easier it is to kill therefore using less water) doesn’t get to affect us.

The whole meat and vegetable production has been taken out of the normal food chain by farming. But water supply is something that we’re still susceptible to. We can always make more animals and plant if we put our mind to it – we believe – because all you need to do is replicate a food chain. The one problem is that there is only one thing that you can’t avoid. Water. You need water every step of the way and we can’t replicate that.

* By the way Petards** are bombs. So being hoisted by your own petard is to be thrown by your own bomb***

** It is also French for farts.

*** It’s from Hamlet – Poor Yorick****

**** I knew – Ed*****

***** I thought your name was Horatio – Ed Harris

If you’ve ever wondered what we need to do if we want world peace then look no further I have the solution!

I think all we need to do is get the European Union in on this whole thing. We’re always being told that they make crazy laws that affect our very existence and this is one of those situations where a crazy law might be exactly what we need.

What we need to do is marry off all of the European royal families to those in the royal families in the middle east thus creating a bond which protects us from war.

We need to literally go medieval on the royals and make them marry the ruling class of the countries around the world that we have problems with right now. That’s what always used to happen in the old days so why not now?

People are always complaining that the royal family doesn’t do anything. So why not this?

Okay I can hear what you’re saying what about the way that the European royals seem to be dying out at a rate of knots and there are so many far east dynasties it’s a wonder anyone can keep track of what’s going on. But I have a solution for that too. All we need to do is get Prince Harry to marry every single on of the royal princesses out there. Because according to the Muslim faith many wives are acceptable as a premise. So why not get him to marry as many as there are and we’ll see if we can get some traction on those peace talks.

It’s got to be worth a shot!

“I gained laitude through platitude”

and

“Eating your fruit by the light of the silvery spoon”.