Life Without The Boring Bits Read online

  And that’s about it for the Christian Hell. An exceedingly boring place that says beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is nowhere interesting for a Christian soul to go in the next life. So why bother to incorporate a next life into what can be in its finest form an excellent code of ethics for this life? If I am offered my druthers after death, I’ll go Julius Caesar’s route and opt for an eternal sleep. Many and many are the times when that fate spells a perfect happiness.

  Here’s my idea of what Hell should be like.

  It’s a place for satiating the senses, but, this being Eternity, they can never be satisfied.

  The liquor is hundred per cent alcohol and is flavored with chili, always chili. It causes an indescribably monumental hangover. The food is delicious, but so much chili is stirred into it that the soul can’t taste anything else, this being chili’s most irritating characteristic. The menu features Testicles on Toast, Turded Tomatoes, Braised Buttocks, Toe Jam, Dead Dermis Decoction, Pickled Penises, Forced Faeces Fondue, and Seared Scrotums. Hell’s dining rooms are stuffed with souls calling for one more little wafeur, and there’s a bucket beside each table. The urine is a wonderful vintage, impudent, glandular and just a soupçon banausic — if the chili didn’t ruin it.

  Sex is freely available, but must be conducted in view of a jeering audience. Another infernal rule permits sex only with virgins, who screech in pain every time the hymen is torn, then sniffle miserably until the act is over. Further infernal rules permit sex in the missionary position only while wearing an inch-thick condom. The virgins are imps in disguise.

  There is music in Hell, but it is on speakers that no one can escape, even inside a cockroach-shaped coffin. There is only one tune, Ravel’s “Bolero” played on the bagpipes. After Satan discovered that a group of Wowsers smuggled bagpipes Upstairs in a haggis, Ravel’s “Bolero” is played at double volume for every last Wowser — and there are billions of them.

  The worst — or best — feature of my Hell is its propensity to pick activities for souls that the souls loathe doing. They are, however, varied: marathon runs for fatties whose inner thighs chafe; idle sprawls on sun lounges for workaholics; long ocean voyages in ships without stabilizers for those who get seasick on a mill pond; minding a thousand toddling kids for souls who detest children; permanent barbecue duty for those who hate to cook; and missing the tie-breaking goal for Manchester United playing at home. There are endless possibilities.

  Hell is every shade of red plus black and shit-brown. Its chairs make one’s bum sore, its tables are either too high or too low, the drawers on its bureaus stick, its beds were designed by Procrustes, and the floor is one heaving mass of cockroaches. It is a hotbed of gossip, if you’ll pardon the pun.

  “The bastard dobbed me in to Central Headquarters!”

  “She sold her sexual favors to Ugh for a new coffin!”

  “I saw both of them smarming up to Hitler!”

  “Huh, think that’s bad? I saw them smarming up to Osama!”

  What a wonderful place is Hell!

  The Catholics, possibly because they’ve been going a lot longer, have yet another Eternal State: It’s called Limbo.

  In Limbo, happiness is almost perfect. All it lacks is the presence of God. Now God I can live without. Having to talk to God is surely the most boring aspect of a Christian Heaven; it must be incredibly tedious trying to make conversation with a being so omniscient there’s not one flavor of quark he doesn’t know because he invented all flavors, threw in spin, and loves popping them in and out of existence. To him, there’s nothing fresh to discuss.

  In Limbo the Old Boy withholds himself as too exclusive for the inhabitants. That probably means no choirs and no pot plants to water, and it may permit cuddles. It’s easy to live without sex, but cuddles are a different matter. I love cuddles.

  Limbo is the place for truly good people who don’t like the Christian God. Translated into Catholic terms, Limbo-ites are the souls who weren’t baptized. In which case, I refuse baptism absolutely. Never happened!

  Limbo has a stupendous book library, the Universe’s biggest collection of comics, and every film or TV program ever made in its DVD library. It takes a microsecond for the book or disc to appear in one’s hand. And its music library boggles the mind, from Bach and Beethoven down to the Beatles and boogie. Music’s colors are on full show and the aether is a perfect medium for their transmission.

  The weather is whatever you fancy without the damage part; when night falls, the entire Universe is spread across the vault, every star named, every planet known. You can wade through two feet of snow and emerge on a tropical beach. Its plants are all beautiful, its sights, smells, tastes, sounds and sensations a constant joy and pleasure. Pet animals are freely permitted, though not compulsory. In fact, nothing is compulsory, which tells me that Limbo contains no lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats or failed schoolteachers.

  The gates of Limbo are anything you want them to be. Above them it says GOOD BUT GODLESS and, below that, WOWSERS NOT WELCOME.

  You now know as much as I do about the places where immortal souls go. They all exist in Eternity, a place where nothing happens because nothing exists. Which is tantamount to saying that they live inside our brains and are simply a part of the mechanisms that govern life.

  If there was a God, why would it spare so much time on Homo sapiens? Are we so important? I cannot think it. If God exists, it made this particular Universe, then moved on. God is not an entity in our meaning of that word. Heaven and Hell are with us on Earth through every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Life is a mixture of both. As Shakespeare said, “Our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

  POPULATE AND PERISH

  No one has any courage these days, and I can’t work out why. Is it a genuine blindness to what is happening, or a deliberate closing of the eyes? One issue above all others screams out to be trumpeted far and wide, yet no one has the guts to do it.

  The other night I watched a documentary called Earth, narrated by a Scots scientist named lain Stewart. It was better than most of its kind, particularly as Dr. Stewart concentrated upon the physical forces at work making planet Earth what it is. His attitude was unfailingly cheerful as he dealt with the cataclysmic disasters Earth has suffered every few hundreds of millions of years, and that is the proper attitude: not doom and gloom, but the good side of seeing whole living populations wiped out, for only when that occurs can evolution take a giant leap forward to produce different and better (if not bigger) species to replace the vanished.

  Easily the most transparent of Dr. Stewart’s speculations concerns the species Homo sapiens, which he thinks will wipe itself out to be replaced by a new species having a better chance of making a go of living on Earth. And he’s happy about it! He’s one of the few TV scientists I’ve encountered with the curiosity and detachment to see Man for what Man actually is — a species breeding itself into extinction.

  Even so, ending his hours-long dissertation at the island of Madagascar, Dr. Stewart didn’t dare utter The Forbidden, for all that he hinted at it heavily throughout. And I found myself wondering if, as seems likely given the man’s pragmatic and lucid Scots temperament, he was firmly told by the financiers of his series that he only got the money to make it if he didn’t so much as breathe the word “over-population”.

  A few years back I flew into Changi airport in Singapore on the first day it reopened after a weeks-long closure due to vast palls of smoke from Indonesia as peasants, in defiance of their central government, burned millions of acres of rainforest to clear it for desperately needed farmland. What must those weeks have been like? I asked myself as my plane touched down in a thick brown fog that reeked of burning organic matter.

  Third World peoples don’t set fire to millions of acres of rainforest because they’re vandals. They do so because there are too many of them to exist on the land already cleared, and as population exponentially rises, the situation grows exponentially worse. Most
of the new mouths are either Muslim or Roman Catholic — two massive religions that forbid contraception, let alone abortion. Religions whose administrators and higher-ups think the world too bounteous ever to be threatened by a landslide of human mouths. Or that some frightful plague is sent by God when its cause is over-population. The day of reckoning has actually already passed, but no one will admit it’s even on the horizon. The rainforests and other forests go to make room for the new mouths that must be fed, be they burned or bulldozed down. And few of the people who do the felling are trained in conservation or scientific farming, so the topsoil is blown or washed away.

  No one speaks of over-population, as if to do so is to utter a blasphemy. No, it is not a blasphemy! It is a fundamental truth so important that all of us should be speaking about it incessantly. Make our politicians and religious leaders admit that it exists, rather than pretend there is no such thing. Why won’t the world’s leaders speak of it? One day, not very far in the future, they will be forced to.

  Why won’t they speak of it? They are too afraid. Afraid of what? The backlash, among other things — a backlash no one can predict as to size, content, passion. Politicians see a loss of votes. Religious leaders see a loss of worshippers. And the new religion, Environmentalism, has managed to side-step the issue as adroitly as politicians and religious leaders.

  In fact, glancing through women’s magazines, I would have to say that the true new religion of the Third Millennium in First World countries is having babies. Once upon a time women thought it unfair to the child to have a baby if no father was at least in the vicinity, but nowadays fathers are an unexpected bonus. Babies are the thing, babies and yet more babies. Film stars are doing it, therefore it’s the right thing to do.

  As Dr. Stewart implies (I daresay he couldn’t be frank), there is nothing wrong with planet Earth, and however huge the mess humankind makes of it, within a million years it will recover and return to normal. It’s not planet Earth we should be worrying about, says Dr. Stewart. We should be worrying about the species called Homo sapiens: Man. What Man is doing to the planet will, given the effluxion of time, correct itself, whereas Man will disappear as if he/she never was.

  Why then is Man in such danger of extinction? A propensity to breed like rabbits, in a nutshell. We have extended the life span of individuals by preserving the old from the diseases that used to carry them off, while simultaneously ensuring that the babies we bear survive to adulthood. That alone causes a huge upward curve in the population graph. But to exacerbate it, three-quarters of the people on the planet are religiously prohibited from limiting the size of their families, though when the religious laws were made, families were ravaged by death. An equally huge upward curve in the graph. China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico have reasonable urban medical care.

  As the song says, something’s got to give. The trouble is that no people, once introduced to the magical phenomena of automobiles, motor bikes, air conditioning, gas, electricity, a constant supply of pure water, sewerage, houses that don’t fall down, glass windows, comfortable beds, plenty of food, flight from one part of the world to another, decent roads, banks, schools, hospitals and entertainment is ever willing to give them up, no matter how much certain people talk of the damage they do to the environment. So fossil fuels will continue to be used until there are none left, the seas will continue to be fished out, and the forests will disappear. How many people know that most ocean fishing is indiscriminate because it’s not done to feed people save indirectly? The fish is used to make fertilizer for growing crops because it’s natural and rich.

  Without the forests to suck up excess carbon dioxide, we will be at the mercy of the first massive volcano eruption as it pours cardon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide into the atmosphere. Add to that, the methane liberated by a melting permafrost in Siberia, and you’ve got real trouble. Like all the other mass extinctions, Man will snuff out choking not for air but for oxygen. And all those billions will be as if they never were.

  The answer isn’t in ceasing to burn fossil fuels. The answer is to slash population drastically — one-child families all over this planet for at least six generations or however many it takes to allow the rain forests to grow back and the consumption of fossil energy to die down to a level the atmosphere finds tolerable. Why are we blaming the planet? More importantly, why are we blaming a relative few? The blame lies in over-population.

  In our present blind, stubborn refusal to see the truth, we have allowed for only two ways to reduce population: war on a scale more frightful than in all of history, or plague on a scale more frightful than in all of history.

  Surely there are people who can see that it’s smarter to push for a one-child family than wait for war or plague? In either of those alternatives, humanity will lose vast numbers of its most educated and gifted persons, for neither war nor plague gives tuppence for qualities like intellect, ability, learning or goodness, and the heroic will perish first because they always do. The best will perish along with the worst, and a mass extinction might end in being a blessing.

  Fear for humanity, not for the planet. Man is but a tiny hiccup along the planet’s way. If humanity extinguishes itself, the wounds it inflicted on the planet will be healed in a million years. The forests will grow back, the oceans de-acidify, the atmosphere be what it should be. And a new species will arise out of the wreckage. A species, one hopes, less masculinely violent, more femininely gentle. A species less prone to be hoodwinked by those awful old men who lead world religions. A species that believes in education for every baby born, that regards every baby born as truly wanted — for the right reasons.

  ONE, POTATO, TWO, POTATO

  Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!

  This is your host, Goliath Ember, speaking to you from the London studios of One Fiery Ember for the last time. In a very few minutes we will have ceased to be, without ever knowing why — and that, ladies and gentlemen, just isn’t fair.

  For the past week the entire world has been frantically talking about the imminent impact of an asteroid code-named MCC with our beloved, defenceless little planet, Earth. Why can nothing be done to avert this looming Armageddon? Science boffins in their thousands have been assaulting the air waves — but the trouble is, ladies and gentlemen, that as far as you, the general public, are concerned, boffins babble gobbledygook. To compound the mystery, no sooner had the Pentagon announced that Earth was doomed, than it disappeared! I ask you: Where is the Pentagon? Who stole the Pentagon? How can we do without the Pentagon?

  Getting back to the asteroid MCC, the boffins say that it’s happening because the magnetic mu is less than one. In which case, why were we taught so much about pi in school? To hear our physics teachers, pi was the root of everything! And one of what, apart from magnets? A pair of old army boots? A bag of jellybeans? Do cows mu? Or is it cats mu?

  Oh, enough of these unanswerable questions!

  In an attempt to ease your last moments, ladies and gentlemen, I have invited three people to join me and discuss the asteroid MCC on our level. They will blow away the pall of dumbfounded ignorance the Pentagon’s shock announcement caused to envelop us like a pyroclastic flow — scorching, impenetrable, terrifying, moving at the speed of an express train, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, out of no —

  FEMALE VOICE

  Oh, for Crissake, get on with it!

  EMBER

  As I name you, milord, sir, and doctor, take a bow! Archibald Teazel, Earl of NFA — Sir Stanley Jam-Butty, boss of the Union of Union Bosses — and Dr. Llow Es Cwnwn Denwymnytufydd, my own scientist for the layman. With a name like that, we will call him Thlow.

  FEMALE VOICE

  Bugger his name! Why aren’t there any women?

  JAM-BUTTY

  We are 52% women, madam, even if there are but 0.00001% women union bosses. If you want women union bosses, I suggest you emigrate to Australia, which runs on women union bosses.

  FEMALE VOICE


  I mean on your program, numb-nuts!

  THLOW

  Not at this time of year, Shirley — it is Shirley, isn’t it? Indeed and to goodness it is, ha ha ha! In late May, Shirley, the nuts are just forming on the trees, shrubs, or bushes. Numbness is a quality owned by every nut from brazil to hazel —

  MILORD

  A nut is shelling us from outer space?

  THLOW

  Outer space is a misnomer, milord, ha ha ha! Asteroids come from inner space, look you. Outer space doesn’t kick in until beyond the Oort Cloud, which is a region vaster than the entire solar system full of icebergs that turn into comets. Our MCC is a rock, not an iceberg, though its impact will be titanic, ha ha!

  EMBER

  Gentlemen, please! Milord, MCC is not a nut coming from inner or outer space! It’s a whacking great hunk of rock that looks just like a potato.

  JAM-BUTTY

  A potato? Washed, or unwashed? Goliath Ember, you middle-class parasite, is this just a ploy to sneer at British working men as the Great Unwashed?

  EMBER

  Washed, Sir Stanley, of course it’s washed! There’s no soil in inner space to dirty it.

  MILORD

  We’re being shelled by a clean potato?

  EMBER