Now that I'm back in Bangor I've signed up for a part-time English Lit MA. My tutor's given me a huge reading list covering my chosen topic (that's the cosmology of Paradise Lost, lit geeks) and told me to bugger off and come back when I've got through it all.

The Bangor English dept also runs an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing. What's all that about, then? How academically rigorous is it? What do the students learn? And what did they do on their holidays?

If you'd like a Creative Writing PhD but you're short of time or money, don't worry: here's a whole course in three short lessons:

Lesson One: Be concise. Never use a long word when a short one will do, and treat all adverbs with suspicion.

Lesson Two: Don't call yourself a 'scribbler' or a 'wordsmith' or refer to what you write as 'ramblings' or 'musings'. It is hard to write with your head stuck up your arse.

Lesson Three: Tell a story in which stuff happens. Include as many good jokes as you can.

Got all those? Good. You are now the proud owner of a PhD from Hilton University, which makes you at least the equal of Gillian McKeith.

Tags: writing, stories, Gillian McKeith

"Bollocks" is a word that doesn't enjoy wide usage in the United States. That's a shame, as it's really useful.

Say, for example, you're Ralph Nader. You've just seen An Inconvenient Truth and it's made you reflect that if you hadn't split the vote in 2000, America would have been governed, for at least one term, by Al Gore - a man seriously committed to tackling climate change. But because you did split the vote, America wound up with a Commander-in-Chief who, shall we say, is not enthusiastic about environmental matters. As an American you have no convenient two-syllable word to chant as you beat your head against the cinema wall in bitter self-recrimination for being the first great dickhead of the new millennium.

For a Brit it would be no problem: bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.

tags: Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Ralph Nader, global warming

It's time to run away and hide your wallets, because the Earthman is raising money.

No, no - it's not for me. It's for the The Brights, one of the world's top secularist organisations. The Brights was only formed a year or so ago, but it has thousands of members worldwide and has been endorsed in the UK by the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society.

Brights believe that the universe is not governed or affected by any supernatural power or deity, and that it's wrong to live our lives as if it is. The Brights' membership roster ranges from hardline God-bashers like St. Richard Dawkins through to moderate Christians - i.e., the ones who believe in the human and social teachings of Jesus Christ, or in Christ as metaphor, or even in a universe created by a non-interventionist God, but who don't accept all the bollocks about God being a biscuit, biscuits saving us from sin and all the rest. I've been told that Sufi Muslims find it easy to be Brights, though apparently beardy-weirdy Osama-alikes find the concept rather more of a challenge to their worldview.

Anyway, if you don't believe in fairies (or biscuits) and you think that belief in fairies (or biscuits¹) has caused far too much trouble in the world already, head over to www.the-brights.net and join up. The guys are on a fundraiser at the moment, and if you can spare twenty quid it will be gratefully received.

^{1. No matter how many times I consider this, I just can't get over it: Roman Catholics and papally-inclined Anglicans literally believe that a biscuit turns into God during the Eucharist. This belief in the apparent divinity of Hob Nobs would be quaint and charming if the defence of it hadn't caused centuries of death and suffering. What I want to know is this: if the biscuits aren't eaten during the Eucharist, do they keep their Jesusly power, or does it wear off? If the vicar takes one home and feeds it to his münsterländer, is Jesus transfigured into a big pile of steaming poo on the vicarage lawn? Does the münsterländer's digestive tract become consecrated ground? In short, what the fuck is going on?}

tags: The Brights, God, Jesus, biscuits, transubstantiation, holy communion, bollocks

Just driven back home along a rainy and windy A55 after a day of moving stuff around the country - with a bit of luck, the last one for a while.

On the way I was listening to Any Questions on Radio Four. Tonight's panel was Chris Huhne (Lib Dem, and a pretty reasonable bloke); Jacqui Smith (Labour Chief Whip, quite nice, but a lover of dull platitudes); Quentin Letts (urbane fascist) and Boris Johnson.

Ah, Boris. If they made you leader of the Tory party you'd win by a landslide. The resulting government wouldn't last more than a week, but it would be a very memorable week. I like people who manage to appear a lot more stupid than they actually are. BoJo is the acme of the type: few manage to conceal such a sharp brain behind such a buffoonish exterior.

He was the star of AQ. Although he's not as articulate as Huhne or Letts, he puts passion and sparkle into his arguments. If he has a problem it is that he's sometimes too funny, searching for gag openings when he could be scoring serious points.

He deserves to be listened to. For a start, the bloke is clever: I've just finished the book he wrote as a tie-in to his TV series, The Dream of Rome - it's clear, carefully argued and passionate. In fact, I'd say that passion is one of the (carefully concealed) marks of the man. He has the faintest whiff of idealism about him. In the introduction to the book he talks about the duty and necessity of standing for public office if you want to do something about the "thugs and barbarians" who so often achieve power.¹

OK, he offends Scousers and people from Papua New Guinea, but he at least seems to say what he thinks, and also to have a mind and moral direction of his own. That's more than you can say for most MPs. I'm reminded of an old cartoon I saw reproduced recently, depicting Churchill and Nye Bevan as giants. They squat across rows of tiny benches on opposite sides of a Lillipution House of Commons, surrounded by their small, faceless colleagues. I'm not suggesting that BoJo has quite that stature, but we should see him as more than just a figure of fun. He has his own mind and he is not afraid to use it. That, alone, makes him a giant in the current political landscape.

After AQ was another bloody awful I've-lost-my-teatowel-oh-there-it-is² Radio Four "drama". I submitted a play to R4 ages ago and it came back unread. How do I know they didn't read it? I heard a rumour that the BBC Writers Room rejects any new writer who seems to be white, male and European. So, using a Pritt Stick, I stuck together pages nine and ten with a little dollop of glue - just enough so you'd have to make a tiny effort to pull them apart. They were still stuck together when the script came back. Talking to contacts I've subsequently made at the BBC, it seems I made two mistakes:

(a) I failed to call myself Ahmed Akhbar Ali al-Khazi, or, even better, an equivalent female name, and include a cover letter explaining how the play was an exploration of the "issues" I "experienced" as a lesbian transexual growing up in Jalalabad;

(b) I wrote a play in which stuff actually happened, right from the start - i.e., it had a character-driven plot. Fatal mistake.

So, a message for Radio Four: less tea-towel drama about people "exploring" relationships and life-choices and more BoJo, please. Or, failing that, more comedy, which you actually do quite well.

<sup>1. I think that's the phrase he used, though I don't have the book in front of me. The particular barbaric thug he was referencing was Charles Clarke. Yes, him. The bloke who thought studying Classics and medieval literature was pointless. I think it's in poor taste to crow when people fall from grace, but I made an exception for Clarke. In fact, I'm still crowing now. I'll only stop crowing when John "Stalin" Reid gets his comeuppance, an event that will be marked by champagne and a small firework party in the Earthman back yard.

2. Not so long ago The Now Show produced a parody Radio Four play in which a woman loses her tea towel and then finds it again. Somewhere on a hill farm in mid-Wales there's a middle-aged radio dramatist banging her head against her desk and mumbling "tea towels...brilliant...why didn't I think of that?"</sup>

tags: Boris Johnson, Radio Four, writing

So whaddya think to my new template? All my own work.

Well, not exactly. The shape is ripped off from a Blogger-ported version of the legendary/clichéd Kubrick theme. I've changed things around and added the fancy header graphic.

The image, I hardly need to tell you, is a detail from Raphael's School of Athens. You can see the whole thing plastered to a wall (literally - it's a fresco) in the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican Museums. The Raph Rooms are well worth a visit, as long as you can cope with the hordes of fat Floridian tourists steaming through at high speed on their way to the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine ceiling is famous, The School of Athens less so, so the porky Yanks tend to ignore it. That's a shame, because for my money Raphael's painting is nearly as good as Michelangelo's, and there's the added bonus of not getting a stiff neck when you look at it.

In case you don't know the work, it's just a big, imaginary, anachrononistic painting of lots of philosophers hanging out and talking philosophy. In the detail above you can see: a bit of Ptolemy the geographer, holding an inflatable globe to establish his geographical credentials; Euclid, apparently bending down to pick up a 10p piece he's spotted on the floor; and a bunch of their students, one of whom seems to be doing the Twist.

The billy-no-mates over on the left is Diogenes the Cynic. Diogenes lived as close to nature as he could. This wasn't 'getting back to nature' in the Tom and Barbara sense, but rather in the sense of sleeping rough and not washing - hence the lack of a social life.

When Diogenes was asked how he maintained an ascetic lifestyle and overcame lustful thoughts, he famously whopped his chopper out and began to masturbate - possibly the finest example in history of educating by example, albeit by a method that seems to have fallen from favour in teacher training colleges. Lots of the other philosophers in the painting are pictured doing the things they're most famous for (Pythagoras and Euclid doing sums; Diagoras legging it out of Athens), so how come Raphael doesn't have Diogenes, who is, after all, centre-stage, having one off the wrist? It's not as if the Renaissance Popes were squeamish about this sort of thing. If I'd been the painter that's what he'd have been doing. In fact, there wouldn't be anyone else in the picture, and it would be called Old Greek Bloke Having A Wank.

Still, I suppose that's the difference between me and Raphael.

tags: Raphael, Vatican, Diogenes, art, masturbation

Ah - back in Bangor. The Earthman transfer is now complete, and the münsterländer and I are now in residence. The house in Yorkshire isn't quite sold yet, owing to banks messing up money transfers, but in general all is well.

The old town is as it ever was: it seems that the gods of the place even knew I was coming back, as in recognition of the occasion they have summoned up some very special rain. Welsh rain is the connoisseur's precipitation of choice: seemingly wetter than rains in other parts of the world, it also has a wonderful tendency to approach the ground at just about any angle other than the perpendicular.

Bangor isn't the land of my fathers, but it is my second home, and I always get a wonderful warm feeling of belonging when I come back here. In the snugs of the local pubs you'll find old men, wrinkled like walnuts and wreathed in pipe smoke, who understand this perfectly. When you tell them about your love of Wales, their creased faces break into smiles. Ah, they say, Parcio ar gyfer canol y dref.

tags: Bangor, Welsh, rain

I'm having a newspaper crisis at the moment. One of the advantages of being a self-employed slacker is that you can set aside a certain amount of time each morning, at a civilised hour, to have a really thorough read of a daily paper. This is enjoyable and informative, and, because I work in a field that requires which a certain understanding of the old zeitgeist, useful.

If you're not too keen on the geist of the zeit you're living in - as, you may have guessed, I am not - then a paper with a certain anti-establishment tinge is must. So up until now I've been happily reading the Guardian, though as I've pointed out in the past, I would strongly deny being a Guardian reader, insofar as that is a distinct group.

The problem with the Guardian is that while its heart is in the right place and its reportage among the best in the world, most of its opinion writers are whining, moaning, bleating, bleeding-heart pinko pains in the arse. Open up a copy of the Guardian and put your ear to it. Go on - can't you just hear them whining? 'Oh, we're so evil for being white, straight and western, so evil!' If you strain really hard you can just make out the sound of Madeleine Bunting self-flagellating with a scourge of wholewheat spaghettini.

So I temporarily switched to the Times. There, I find politics and a world view that are much more to my liking: moderate, reasoned, pragmatic, liberal in the proper sense of the word, and, above all, with a distinct libertarian streak. It is the home of the sublime Matthew Parris. The problem with the Times is that, with the exception of the business section, the news tends towards what I call the Telegraph-trashy style.

So what do I do? The obvious answer is to read the news from the Guardian and the comment from the Times. The convenient way to do that would be via RSS. But that's not as satisfying as picking up a paper and reading it from cover to cover with a cup of tea.

tags: Guardian, Times

As I'm more or less busier than I've ever been at any point during the whole of my life right now, I thought it might be a good time to update Lost Earthman. The grand house move is taking place next week, and from then I shall be in Wales fr a while. That'll probably be the next time you hear anything from me.

Right: off to pack some more bloody books into bloody boxes. I do wish I was illiterate sometimes.