THE BLASPHEMER WHO CAME FROM OUTER SPACE

I was watching the brilliant Stewart Lee’s stand-up DVD 90s Comedian the other evening and on it he talks about the time in 2005 when he received a ton of hate mail from born-again Christians after the BBC decided to show his controversial musical Jerry Springer: The Opera. A private court case brought against him by Christian Voice – a totalitarian organisation that had never seen the show – was rejected by a magistrate’s court because, as Lee claims in his stand-up act, “it was not 1508.”

It was during this section of his act that Stewart Lee asked the audience if any of them had ever been accused of blasphemy and as I watched in the comfort of my lounge I said to myself, “Yes, I have.”

Since my wife went back to the UK to study Fine Art at the University of Cumbria talking to myself has become a worryingly regular feature of my life. My neighbour has been largely absent owing to the fact that his wife has returned after spending three or four months in the UK handing over her business. The bromance that my neighbour and I had – those halcyon days where we talked about comic books, listened to loud obnoxious music, watched unnecessarily gory zombie films, cooked meals for each other (well, I cooked and he defrosted) and got drunk on a regular basis – is now a distant memory, a fleeting wonderful thing of the past. But, although I am on my own and talking to myself on a regular basis, at least I am not like my neighbour, who now, when he is at home, only listens to quiet music and talks exclusively about shopping, shoes, handbags and fluffy kittens.

Although my experience of being accused of blasphemy was nowhere near as stressful as what Stewart Lee underwent, it was still a strange thing to go through.

It was 1990 and I was in the Royal Air Force at RAF Marham in Norfolk. One of the secondary duties I had was working as deputy editor on the Station magazine The Marham News. The editor and I had resurrected a defunct magazine, writing virtually all the articles ourselves for the first couple of issues until we had enough contributors to ease off and concentrate on what we actually wanted to include. One of the things I wanted to appear in the magazine was a full-page comic strip that myself and a good friend of mine, Phil Gibbons, had created called They Came From Outer Space (But Spoke Our Language Perfectly). It was an homage to the black-and-white American science fiction movies of the 1940s and 50s that included frequent references to popular culture.

A (not very clear) panel from the original strip featuring the Geriatric Radioactive Narrow-Minded Tortoises.

Phil and I began writing and drawing the strip at RAF Hereford in 1987 and although we were both in our mid-thirties we were both avid readers of the weekly comic 2000AD and I would appreciate it if you don’t judge us on that. Lots of adults read comics – there is no shame in it.

They Came From Outer Space was about two aliens with pointy head and Mohican haircuts who are scouring the universe looking for the perfect hairdresser, which they eventually find on Earth. It consisted of three parts, of which the first part contained ten episodes. The tenth episode was due to appear in the October issue of the magazine and I didn’t want the second part to start until the New Year. So, rather than have readers lose interest I decided to fill the two month gap with two specially written episodes that explained the religion of the planet where the two main alien characters hailed from.

They Came From Outer Space was very popular and so it came as a bit of a surprise when I was contacted by the editor who told me that he had received a written complaint and that I should see him as soon as possible.

When I arrived at the editor’s office he handed me a letter that had been sent to the magazine by a Corporal who worked in the Electrical Supply Group (ESG) at Marham. I knew him vaguely, but didn’t make a point of spending much time with him because I thought he was a bit of a tosser.

I turned out to be absolutely correct about my opinion of him because nobody but a tosser would send a letter to an in-house Station magazine like the one I had just read.

In the letter he complained about how my comic strip was an affront to God and Our Lord Jesus and all of his followers (him included). He stated that I would go to Hell for what I had written and that he was writing a separate letter to the Padre, requesting him to speak to the Station Commander in order to have me charged with blasphemy, punishable with, I can only assume, eternal damnation.

A panel from the offending strip.

Now, I’m an atheist and therefore don’t believe in God or the Devil. I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell and I don’t believe that Jesus Christ ever existed. I think people who believe in these things are deluding themselves – if JRR Tolkein had written The Hobbit two thousand years ago these same people would in all probability be worshipping Bilbo Baggins today.

A few years ago my daughter attended a group run by the local Baptist church in the village where we were living at the time. They were fairly pleasant people individually, but collectively they were as mad as a box of frogs. They were, it turned out, a random collection of exes – ex-junkies, ex-pissheads, ex-wife beaters, etc. They had replaced one crutch of dependence with another and were now true believers.

Fossils are not facts in the world of the true believer, they are merely placed there by God to make us doubt. True believers are – what the rather marvellous Scottish writer Christopher Brookmyre alludes to – Unsinkable Rubber Ducks – people who still continue to believe in something despite all the evidence to the contrary.

I liked the people in Baptist group immensely. I liked them because they took me out for meals in order to convert me to their particular form of Christianity. They may have succeeded had it not been for the timely intervention of my wife who asked me if I could help her one day because she had invited five thousand of our friends round for dinner and we only had five loaves of bread and four fishes in the freezer.

I like to tell people that I had recognised the supreme silliness of believing in something that could never ever be proven, but in all honesty I have to admit that I rejected their religion because a system of belief that relates humanity to an order of existence intended to explain the meaning and origin of life in the Universe cannot be solely based on how good the Peshwari Naan and Chicken Balti is in The Golden Raj Indian Restaurant on the High Street.

But thinking about it, the real reason I didn’t buy into their religion was because of their irrational hatred for almost every other religious movement. They hated the Mormons, the Muslims, the Seventh Day Evangelists, the Lutherans, the Anglicans, the Anabaptists, the Pentecostalists, the Adventists, the Quakers, the Amish, the Methodists, the Calvinists, the Budhists, the Hindus, the Presbyterians and especially the Catholics. They even hated the other Baptist Church in the village because it didn’t follow their strict guidelines.

Now that is a lot of hate. As I said before I am an atheist, but I don’t hate any group of people because they have different ideals to mine. In fact there are only two things in life that I genuinely hate and they are gooseberries and tripe.

Three if you count Downton Abbey.

And there was me thinking that religion was all about love.

But I’m digressing. Let’s get back to that letter.

The editor of The Marham News took the letter from me and said “I’ll photocopy this idiot’s letter and give you a copy. I’m going to print it but I want you to write a reply, which I will publish alongside it in next month’s issue.”

“I’m not going to apologise,” I said.

“I don’t want you to apologise. I just want a balanced view.”

“Good.”

My reply went something like this,

Dear Cpl Wankstain,

I read your letter with interest and I have taken on board all of your comments about the episode of They Came From Outer Space that appeared in the December issue of The Marham News.

Whilst I sympathise with your views I can’t help thinking that if God does exist (as you believe he does) and He created us in His image then it must be logical to assume that He has a sense of humour and the ability to laugh at Himself.

Regards

Steve Mitchell

I never heard any more from him after my letter appeared next to his in the December issue of The Marham News.

Maybe – like a good Christian – he forgave me.

THE PAPERLESS OFFICE

 WARNING: This has nothing at all to do with the story that follows.

When I posted my last blog I put it on (as I usually do) the RAF Supplier's Past & Present page on facebook. The post, if you remember, was called A Creature of Habit and was advertised with two pairs of Converse trainers featuring Batman and Superman designs. This was because they were featured in the story. Someone, I don't know who, decided to report me to the Administrator of the page for reasons known only to him/herself.

Now, it was entirely possible that he/she reported the post because they thought that I may have been trying to sell something. If so, why not check the post out first? Maybe reading it would have convinced him/her that I wasn't trying to sell anything to anyone, but merely using the space I had to put a smile on their faces in these dark and depressing times of ours.

I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart the anonymous person who reported me to the Administrator of RAF Suppliers Past & Present. It was as a direct result of his/her cowardly action that my blog got more hits than ever before.

The picture below is of the gold reserve at Fort Knox and I am going to use this image to advertise my post on the RAF Suppliers Past & Present page. This does not mean that I am advertising a Closing Down Sale at Fort Knox and nor does it mean that I have any gold to sell myself. 

It's just a picture - and if you can't see that then you are a moron.

Regards

Steve

The Gold Reserve at Fort Knox

OK - so here we go - THE PAPERLESS OFFICE

I used to work in an office where my line manager would constantly send me emails, generally with attachments in them and most likely containing a single sentence that read: You may find something of interest in the attached document.

May find something of interest? By that rationale I could equally find something that was not of interest. You may find something of interest suggests that the sender had not actually read the attachment being sent. Perhaps a better way of wording the email would have been: You may or may not find something of interest in the attached document, so perhaps instead of reading it you would prefer to delete it as I am merely wasting your time sending it to you in the first place.

When I opened the attachment I’d more often than not find a ninety-five page document full of gobbledy-gook and management-speak that didn’t interest me at all.

I hate emails. I hate them because they are partly responsible for the lack of communication between people at work and after I had received a few of this type of email I decided that there was only one correct course of action to take and so, for a long period of time when I arrived at work in the morning my first action of the day was to delete all the emails my line manager had sent me without even opening them.

I felt an enormous sense of achievement when I did it, knowing full well that as I pressed that delete key I was achieving absolutely nothing. But it felt good to do it – in fact it felt so good that I started to randomly delete other emails that I received. After a while the urge to start work with a clean slate became so strong that I started to delete all my emails without reading a single one. For ages I didn’t open a single email; I would arrive at work and select all the emails and delete the lot without a single thought.

I’ve always had this theory that if something’s important enough someone will contact you if you haven’t done anything about it and so I sat at my desk and waited.

Nothing happened. Nobody contacted me about anything.

And that got me thinking; why stop at emails? Why not look at all the other stuff that had been littering my desk for such a long time and dispose of that? I went through the files in my in-tray and made a snap five-second decision on what I should do with each of them. Shredding them seemed like a good idea and so each day I would take a file into the Copy Room and run it through the shredder. Eventually I ran out of my own files to shred and therefore had to shred other people’s files. I came into work early to do this.

My colleague asked me if I’d seen a file of his that had disappeared, but I told him I hadn’t. At lunchtime that day he couldn’t find his daily newspaper.

The last time I’d had this much fun at work was in the summer of 1976.

I was in the RAF working as a Demands Clerk in West Germany. I was twenty-two years old and it was, without question, the most boring job I had ever done in my entire life. There were probably other jobs around that were arguably just as boring as an RAF Demands Clerk, but I couldn’t think of any at the time.

I worked alongside three other airmen with a Sergeant in charge of us and the only way of combatting the boredom was to find interesting things to do that occupied our young minds when the Sergeant was out of the office. During that hot summer of 1976 we spent the afternoons attempting to slice airborne wasps in two with steel rulers. It seemed a good idea at the time and was actually great fun until one of the guys had an allergic reaction after being stung in the neck by a particularly vindictive and persistent wasp. He was rushed to the Medical Centre and we didn’t see him at work again for six weeks. We closed the windows after that to prevent the wasps from getting in and the only time we opened them was to throw away Maria’s drinks.

Maria was employed as our tea lady. She was a short, dumpy Dutch widow with a small face who wore droopy surgical stockings and Deirdre Barlow spectacles that were far too big for her. You could tell her the worst joke in the world and she would laugh at it. Maria laughed at anything. She even laughed when I told her I was going on compassionate leave to attend my Grandmother’s funeral.

The sergeant told me that Maria laughed all the time because she was nervous.

“People who are nervous don’t laugh all the time,” I said. “People who are mad do that.”

“Now, now,” he replied. “Just remember that it takes all kinds.”

“All kinds of what? Nutters?”

At that moment, Maria came into the office, pushing her tea trolley ahead of her.

“Are you alright this morning, Maria?” the sergeant asked.

She winked at him, laughed, and handed him his tea.

Maria made the worst tea and coffee anyone had ever tasted. I have no idea what she did to it but she was able to make even the most drinkable drinks undrinkable. When OC Supply Squadron held his monthly meeting with other heads of departments they would rush through the agenda in order to bring the meeting to an end once they realised it was getting dangerously close to tea-break. After their first visit people would actively avoid the tea room and would panic at the sound of Maria’s trolley. I once found two visitors who were close to tears hiding in the toilets.

“She knows we’re in here,” whimpered one of them. “It’s only a matter of time before she finds us.”

“Do us a favour,” the other one said to me, “Pop your head out the door and see if she’s still there. If we’re lucky we might be able to make a dash for it.”

“It’s no good,” said his friend, “I can hear her trolley jingling up and down the corridor. It’s like the theme tune from Jaws!”

We never drank Maria’s tea or coffee and instead opened the window of the office and poured it on the grass outside. Several weeks had passed by when my friend called me over to the window. There was some urgency in his voice and so I moved quickly to see what the problem was.

“Look,” he said, with a disgusted expression. He pointed in the direction of the grass underneath the window where we had been pouring Maria’s drinks.

It was horrible. It was disgusting. No wonder no-one liked her drinks. Underneath the window, where our unwanted teas and coffees had been soaking into the ground was a clump of the ugliest looking toadstools I’d ever seen.

When the sergeant asked Maria how her husband had died, she just smiled and said, “Poisoned,” before leaving the room with a roar of laughter.

The sergeant looked at his tea with a mixture of horror and disgust, before pushing it away from him. “Get rid of this for me, will you Steve,” he said.

I picked up his cup and took it over to the window, where I poured it onto the toadstools below. “It takes all kinds, Sarge,” I said to him, “it takes all kinds.”

The sergeant was decent bloke who insisted on a clear desk policy if we wanted to leave early on a Friday afternoon. This could be achieved in two ways:

1.     Work really hard all week so that your desk is clear by early Friday afternoon.

2.     Piss about for most of the week until Friday afternoon, whereupon you gather up all the paperwork on your desk, place it in a large envelope and address it yourself, then put that in the internal mail so that you to receive it on Monday morning.

I chose the second option and I used it for many years. I would have still been using it if it hadn’t been for the introduction of emails, which are difficult to hide.

Unless you delete them from your inbox and your deleted items tab.

My line manager was beginning to suspect that I wasn’t doing any work. She’d seen me wandering around with a clipboard in my hand, glancing every now and again at an out-of-date form that I had attached to it. My desk was always clear and I was always in early, but that was usually to shred files I had discovered in trays in the Admin Office.

“I sent you an email last week about training design. What do think?” she asked.

“I haven’t got a clue,” I said.

“What do you mean? You have received the email?”

“Probably.”

“Probably? What do you mean probably?”

“I receive your emails but I don’t read any of them,” I told her honestly. “In fact I delete all your emails without even opening them.”

She looked at me flabbergasted. “Why?” she asked.

“Because you sit opposite me,” I said. “If you’ve got something important to say to me, say it to my face. Don’t just send an email and not say anything.”

I could tell she was about to berate me so I jumped in first, “That’s a nice dress you’re wearing. Is it new?”

“Well, yes . . . actually it is? How could you tell?”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen you in it before. Listen I’ve got to pop out for lunch – I’ll catch up with you this afternoon.”

“Oh . . . all right. See you later then,” she said, smiling at me.

As I left the office and headed for the shredder I heard her asking a colleague if she’d seen the Ryvita’s she had brought in for her lunch that day.

She was sure she’d left them in the top drawer of her desk.

A CREATURE OF HABIT

I had a bit of a panic the other evening.

I was in something of a rush to get out of the house and therefore didn’t really pay enough attention as I was getting dressed. I’m very particular about the clothes I wear when I go out for the evening. The right pair of shorts has to selected, followed by the correct superhero T-shirt. I then have to decide which pair of Converse boots to put on – do I put my black Batman pair on tonight or should I wear the blue ones with the Superman logo on the sides?

Decisions, decisions.

However, all of this careful planning will fall by the wayside if the wrong pair of underpants is selected. A night out involving alcohol requires the correct underpants; they can’t be too tight and they can’t be too loose. If they’re too tight you end up pulling at them all night, which gives the impression that you spend far too much time playing with yourself. If they’re too loose there’s too much movement down there and you end up frequently rearranging yourself throughout the evening, which again gives the impression that much of your time is spent . . . well, you get the picture.

Anyway, as I said I dressed rather hurriedly in order to get out of the house and over to the bar. It was someone’s leaving party and there would be free food on offer. My wife had recently gone back to the UK to study Fine Art at the University of Cumbria and so I’m out here on my own and the promise of free food meant I that wouldn’t have to cook for myself.

It’s not that I can’t cook – I consider myself to be fairly proficient in the kitchen and have cooked chilli con carne, pizzas and dhal for some of my neighbours since my wife left. I’m not, say, like my neighbour whose wife is also in the UK. When he said to me the other day “Why don’t you come over for a curry tonight – I’m cooking,” what he really meant to say was “Why don’t you come over for a curry tonight. Someone cooked for it for me last month, and I took it out of the freezer this morning. If you phone me five minutes before you’re planning to arrive I’ll just pop it in the microwave and it’ll be ready for when you get here.”

  

So, I went to the leaving party and ate the free food and drank the free beer. I had no idea who was leaving and, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really care. I knew I would have to listen to a long rambling leaving speech later in the evening, but that would be a small price to pay for the vast quantities of free food and drink I would have consumed by that time.

Drinking beer does have its drawbacks; first of all it gets you fairly inebriated and your speech will eventually become incoherent to anyone who has not been drinking as much as you. Secondly, you need to urinate at roughly fifteen minute intervals after a certain point in the evening. I try and hold off my first visit to the urinal for as long as I can because, as all men know, once you start (or break the seal, as one person accurately described it to me) that’s it; the rest of the evening is spent wanting to go for a piss so much that you end up not listening to what anyone is saying because you’re too busy concentrating on not wanting to go for a piss. I think it’s actually a proven scientific fact that in men the ratio of urine to beer over the course of an evening’s drinking is 3-1 – there’s just no stopping it once it starts flowing.

The drunker some men get the more they become critical of the female of the species. They say things like: “I don’t fancy yours,” or “She must have hit all the branches of the ugly tree on the way down,” or (my personal favourite) “I’ve never been to bed with an ugly woman, but I’ve woken up with a few”. It’s almost as if, upon downing their fifth or sixth pint, they have been magically transformed into Brad Pitt, Leonardo DeCaprio or Johnny Depp, minus their vast fortunes, extensive properties and interesting personalities.

By 9.30 I had reached the point of no return, that moment where I had an overwhelming urge to “break the seal” and so I stumbled off in the direction of the toilets. It was only when I reached my designated urinal that I realized the first of my mistakes. It was a schoolboy error, one that could have been easily rectified before I had even left the house; but in my haste to get to the free food and drink one that I had blatantly ignored – I had stupidly left the house to overindulge in alcohol wearing a pair of shorts that had a button-up fly instead of a zip.

When you’ve had too much to drink, even the simplest of tasks can transform themselves into tongue-poking efforts of concentration. Even a zip can be can be difficult, especially when trying to find the little metallic tag that allows you to open it. But buttons – compared to unzipping a fly, undoing buttons when under the influence is a positively Herculean task.

To make matters worse earlier that week I had almost sliced the end of my finger off while I was preparing onions for a dhal I was making. I had just sharpened the knife and as I brought it down on the onion it skidded off the top and buried itself into the end of my finger. Ironically the last time I had almost sliced the end of my finger off was in 1968 when I was working in a hotel kitchen chopping vegetables – although it was a carrot, and not an onion, that was the culprit that time.

Some of my blood eventually worked its way into the dhal I was making, but my neighbour thought it tasted OK – although I didn’t tell him about the blood.

Now I’m not good with blood, especially my own, and I tend to go into shock until someone qualified reassures me that I’m going to be all right. I ran my finger under the tap, trying not to look at it, and then wrapped it in toilet paper and rushed off to the Medical Centre. The medics were very helpful once they’d stopped laughing about the fact that I’d done this while attempting to cook after my wife had gone back to the UK. I tried to explain that I cooked anyway, but I don’t think any of them believed me.

Doctors and medics (as opposed to Doctor and the Medics who had a hit with a cover of Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky in 1986) have a peculiar, almost innate sense of black comedy which they direct at their patients on fairly regular basis. 

In 2008 I had an accident involving an open door and some washing. My wife had been ironing some shirts at the time and hanging them above the door. As I ducked under the shirts I misjudged my entrance and smashed my head against the corner of the doorframe, at which point my eyebrow started to bleed profusely.

“Whatever you do,” said my wife, “do not look in the mirror.”

I looked in the mirror. 

What I saw was my face covered in blood and I immediately started to panic. My wife sighed as if she had seen all this before (which of course she had). She stopped ironing my shirts, bundled me into the car and drove me to Casualty.

When I eventually got to see a doctor he cleaned up the blood and told me that I was going to be OK and that there was no way that I was going to bleed to death, but he was going to have to close up the wound.

“Now,” he said, “you can either have stitches or I can seal it up with glue.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, thinking that stitches would probably hurt.

“Well, if I put stitches in the scar it will eventually disappear,” he said reassuringly, “but if I use glue you’ll end up with a permanent scar that’ll make you look like a Bond villain.”

“Get that glue on me now,” I told him without a moment’s hesitation.

So, back at the party, I was stood at the urinal fumbling with my fly, trying desperately, with my inebriate’s sausage fingers, to unbutton the damn thing. It has been well documented over the ages that drunkenness makes even the simplest actions supremely difficult and if you don’t believe me try watching a drunk attempting to stroke a passing dog.

It took me at least three minutes just to get one button undone, by which time my bladder was so full I was convinced something the size of a medicine ball was pressing against my kidneys.

I was about to discover, however, that having a button-up fly was the least of my problems. As I popped open another button and plunged my hand into my shorts I discovered, to my horror the second of my mistakes; in the rush to get out of the house, I had put my underpants on inside out!

The flap on the right side of my underpants where I would usually slip my fingers in to pull my todger out was no longer there. It was now on the other side, but in my confused, drunken state I couldn’t work out what had happened. I just stood there, scooting my hand across what appeared to be a vast, endless piece of cloth, hoping to find some kind of entrance so that I could relieve myself, but after 5 minutes I was still fumbling with a glazed look on my face (and probably dribbling as well).

A bloke behind me asked if I was all right and I gave him the usual drunk’s reply of, “Nnnneeerrrraaaassssaaapher,” before I undid my belt, dropped my shorts and pulled down my underpants. 

I was at the urinal for a good five minutes with the kind of expression a man has on his face only after he’s had sex.

After I got home that night I made a mental note to check my clothing thoroughly before I went out to another party. But I knew I wouldn’t – the pull of a party with free food and booze is just too much for me.

I am, I suppose, like all men, a creature of habit.