Indulge me

You know, it’s all too easy for us secular types to be cynical about religion, but it’s time we acknowledged that institutions can change with the times. No longer, for example, is the Catholic Church simply a repository of unbridled wealth and power maintained by peddling ridiculous superstitions to the credulous and vulnerable. Twenty-first-century faith is a sophisticated lifestyle choice, a rational sober decision, an intelligent response to the moral dilemmas and deeper questions posed by a complex world that—oh look, they’re giving away papal indulgences again. It’s a limited offer: get yourself to Lourdes some time in the next year and knock off some of the time you’re due to spend in purgatory. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of a young girl hallucinating an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, you have an unrivalled opportunity to triumph over the Catholic Church’s cosmology thanks to the pope’s magic powers! Distance yourself from the horrific sadistic tortures of Hell dreamt up by weird ascetic medieval monks! Only the Church’s special blend of spells and incantations can preserve your eternal soul!

Sorry, where was I?


Remarkably, I have not photoshopped this picture. That is his nibs’s actual hat.

Knitmare

Many thanks to tao_ for dragging my attention to something that was already lurking in my flat. Brochures for all manner of random crap still arrive for people who haven’t lived here for going on eight years. One of the recent crop came from Brora Scottish Cashmere. I flicked through it to see if there was anything eyecatching and then discarded it, since typically it consisted of pictures like this:



“David”, we are led to believe, paid £219 for that herringbone top and £95 for the shirt, which leads me to suspect that “David” is running some sort of black ops budget, working some outrageous margins into the outgoings he’s reporting to his wife while he salts the bulk of it away towards one day buying his own attack helicopter.

I should clearly take more time before dismissing things as uninteresting, though, as I entirely managed to miss ( “Henry” )