Religion. Childrens books. Lubricant. Hedgehogs. Thatcher.

Here’s fun. You probably didn’t know that you can buy communion wafers on Amazon. And of course Amazon tells you what else frequent buyers of each product purchased:

I guess it could be a set up. The comments are pretty funny:

Somehow the manufacturer has managed to get rid of that disturbing bloody aftertaste that plagues most brands of Jesus’ raw flesh. Maybe they somehow siphon off the Jesus blood to use it in making tasty, iron-rich, blood of Jesus-flavored wine.

For those people who suffer from celiac disease, and therefore are unable to tolerate wheat, we wonder if this tasty Jesus-flavored snack would still trigger the destructive autoimmune reaction that typifies celiac disease.

Over the summer break I finally got around to reading the first book in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy; it’s pretty strange – a childrens (or rather young adult) book about the Catholic Church and child abuse. It’s obviously written as a secular, humanist response to C S Lewis and his Narnia books, and it seems to me that all the crazy accusations leveled agains the Harry Potter books (pagan brainwashing, etc) are actually kind of accurate if you shine them on His Dark Materials. Pullman’s a very good writer, but not quite good enough to pull off the trick of seamlessly combining his propaganda and his art. It’ll be interesting to see if the books stand the test of time.

I also read John Connelly’s Book of Lost Things, which I highly recommend, although it is very dark. I’m not sure if it’s a childrens book or a book about childhood. To prove to myself that I’m still a grown up I sat down last night with Phillip Larkin. I read Aubade:

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die

That line – vast moth-eaten . . . -drifts through my mind whenever I enter a church and I’ve always wondered where it came from but never got around to googling it, so it’s nice to scratch that itch. I think Aubade is his finest work, although I’m also fond of The Mower:

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Amazingly Thatcher wanted to make him Poet Laureate (in return Larkin liked her personally but felt politically that she was too left wing).