The Secret Life of Beers

Originally published in Swine Magazine - April 09

If like me you find the conversation can dry up after 12 solid drinking hours, read on and furnish your pickled brain with some proper knowledge on our malty best friends.

Hoegaarden

This trendy witbieren was on its arse back in 1955. The Belgian Hoegaarden brewery (named after the town) closed its doors and it was left to a milkman called Pierre Celis to brew some up in hay loft ten years later. Demand was still high and times were good, until a massive fire claimed the new brewery in 1985 and Celis had to take the InBev dollar to rebuild it. He complained that InBev wanted to change the traditional recipe to make the beer more mass marketable, and took his ball home, starting the new Celis Brewery in Texas. InBev tried to close the Hoegaarden brewery and move it but local protests stopped them in their tracks and the beer continues to be brewed there.

The traditional many sided Hoegaarden glass comes in 12 sizes, from a tiny shot glass used for product launches to a 12 pint version which InBev claim is for 'display purposes only'.

Tetley's Bitter

Henry Boddington, John Smith and Joshua Tetley – or the Holy Trinity as I call them – are the fathers of modern British Bitter. Joshua bought the Leeds brewery in 1822 and in 1839 made his son a partner in the new Joshua Tetley and Son Brewery. By the sixties the company was expanding and merged with the Warrington Walkers (of which I am not one – my family were the other Warrington Walkers, much to my shame), the start of many name changes and buyouts until the word Tetley was dropped from the brand all together and Carlsberg UK became the brewer.

In 1911 Tetley's challenged Harry Houdini to escape from a cask of their ale. He didn't manage it, and indeed who would want to?

Guinness

Synonymous with Ireland but based on a porter, which originated in London. So concerned were the brewery with quality they hired a statistician called William Sealy Gosset to work out which were the best yielding varieties of barley. To prevent Guinness secrets being revealed he was never allowed to publish academic papers under his own name, and his greatest work, Student's t-distribution, was published under this pseudonym. I haven't the foggiest what this t-distribution means but basically whenever you use Microsoft Excel you're using it.

Burn The Arenas : The MEN vs the Hollywood Bowl

I find it hard to express in words how much I detest the Manchester Evening News Arena. Usually I settle for a primal scream which is a cross between a slaughtered goat and the first spasmodic mewlings of a Boyzone reunion tour audience. Sometimes I dress a dummy in a big yellow jacket and burn it, simultaneously hitting it with sticks and crying.

The MEN is like a punishment for wanting to be entertained. I suspect it was designed by a member of Opus Dei who is sickened by the decadence of performance that he wants us all to be metaphorically birched by high ticket prices, ridiculously overpriced food and a Gestapo like staff who would sooner leave your children orphaned than allow you to use flash photography.

I haven't been to the MEN for a while, in fact I have avoided it like the plague. Actually, if someone said to me "Kirsty, there's a village over there with the plague, or there's the MEN arena", I would hitch hike to the plague ridden village singing Hallelujah. Unfortunately, any performer slightly more popular than The Wurzels seemed destined to end up there and so I ventured to see Steve Coogan wishing I could just be blinkered and sedated like a travelling racehorse until I reached my seat.

First off, you don't park in the MEN if you want to get home before dawn. The arena car park is so congested that you all sit beeping and shouting at each other, edging forward inch by inch until someone just speeds over the edge of level four and everyone is rescued by helicopter. The alternative is to give £6 to Dazza who will ensure your car isn't broken into by waving a baseball bat with nails sticking out of it.

Once inside, that's it – you can't exit unless you're going home. This is because all of the tickets are checked by barcode, so once you get scanned, you're a prisoner of the venue. This is where the real fun begins. Fancy a drink? Well you've been frisked for bottles on the way in so you'll have to pay £3 for a warm mini-bottle of Becks that looks like something you'd give to a child so he could play at being a landlord. Either that or a pint in a plastic cup for £4.

Food is relegated to the starchy and inedible. They have a team of Chinese kids selling ice cream and candy floss, or a strange chicken wrappy thing, also £4. The hotdogs look like they've been made from previous employees and the pies were last seen on I Wouldn't Eat That, the hilarious consumer programme hosted by Nicky Campbell's devolved sense of self-importance.

Whilst sitting in this consumerist nightmare I recalled this summer when I went to Los Angeles and saw the new musical by Eric Idle at the Hollywood Bowl. The Bowl is one of the best and most famous performance venues in the world, but rather than beat you over the head with this fact they actively encourage people to come for the music and not the opportunity to spend. You can bring in your own food and drink (yes, even alcohol) and although they do provide food themselves it's reasonably priced. They rent you cushions to sit on for $2 and the only programme is a $3 magazine listing all of the season's performances and interviewing the people involved. Once inside the venue you can wander round as you please, the staff are actually there to help you rather than make you feel like you're in jail, and you can take flash photography all you want – it's an outdoor venue so it will look shit anyway. Oh, and by the way – the seats were even cheap. £10 to see the show from the cheap seats, with a view ten times better than the top tier of the MEN.

If the Bowl was transplanted to Manchester they'd ban all outside food and drink, force you to buy their rancid fast food and ensure that all staff members were on strict instructions not to allow anything which might pass for enjoyment or freedom. Ticket prices would skyrocket and they'd draft in Tweenies On Ice for a few months to make sure that a whole new generation of gig goers believed that this was the pinnacle of entertainment.

The Echo Arena is exactly the same, as is the NEC in Birmingham and the SECC in Glasgow. All nasty soulless places which have little to do with music, or with fun. Luckily it seems that all but the leviathans of music have deserted the Arena circuit, preferring to play twice as many shows in small venues and not have to spend millions on lighting design just to make sure the stage doesn't look too shit in the aircraft hanger they've been booked into.

Carling venues aren't up to much either but at least they don't try and masquerade as some kind of 'experience'. I'd rather 'experience' a rectal examination than the plastic scalping that goes on at arenas. I suggest an organised rebellion whereby 20,000 people all buy tickets to an event and walk in there wearing nacho hats filled with hot cheese. If I win the lottery this weekend I will make it happen. And so perish all tyrants!

Walker's Best Of 2008 - a lazy opinion piece for Swine Magazine

Originally published in http://www.swinemagazine.co.uk/ Dec 08


Best LP Jonathan Coulton - JoCo Looks Back

Some would say your life isn't complete until you've heard an arresting love song which was written from the point of view of a giant squid. I would be one of those people.

Runners Up : Flight Of The Conchords – Flight Of The Conchords, Laura Marling -Alas, I Cannot Swim

Best Live Act Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm – Manchester Uni – 29.10.08

All seated, full of people who laugh at references to the computer game Fable, songs about fractals and fighting nuns. Sounds like the world's worst gig but was actually the world's greatest.
Also featured a cameo from Neil Gaiman, reading lyrics about a creepy doll.

Runners Up : Edwyn Collins, Serj Tankian

Top 5 Singles
5. Lightspeed Champion – Galaxy of The Lost
4. Black Kids – I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You
3. Laura Marling – Ghosts
2. Estelle - American Boy
1. Vampire Weekend – Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

Best Club Strangeways @ The Library, Leeds

No point in explaining because I bet no-one's ever been there but this IS the best club night of 2008.
Runners up : Jamm, Brixton ; The Cabin Club,Liverpool and its foetal DJs

Best Film The Dark Knight

Almighty hype + Recently dead young actor usually = overrated but TDK was bombastic, brooding and surprising.

Runners up : The X Files : I Want To Believe (Yes, honestly)

Best TV Heroes (BBC 2)

To all the naysayers who have been complaining about a drop in quality, Sylar is the best character on television, and Sylar is in Heroes, therefore, Heroes is the best thing on television. www.endofshow.com/thelist is my Heroes podcast BTW.

Runners Up : Dead Set (Channel 4), The IT Crowd (Channel 4)

Best Radio Russell Brand

Well I think the loss of the show is a loss to BBC 2, and seeing as I can't vote for myself…

Runner Up : Me on End Of Show (HCR 92.3) (Balls to humility)

Best Book Stephen King – Duma Key

Chilling return to horror from the spookiest looking author of all time. Seriously, he looks like one of his own monsters.

Runner up : Stephen Fry In America

Best Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo Who am I to argue with everyone else in the world?

Best Event San Diego Comic-Con 2008

Attendees may be pegged as huge geeks but Comic-Con is the breeding ground of everything you will see on a screen for the next year. The media kingmakers' convention.

Best Weather Girl/Boy

Dianne Oxberry, watch the featured locations on the map, she spells out swear words with them – seriously, one week it was Chester, Urmston, Northwich, Trafford.

Tomasz Schafernaker – eye candy, the only thing worth watching on BBC News 24. Gives me a warm front every time.

What I Did In My Holidays

Originally published in www.swinemagazine.co.uk Sep 08

One of my finest school moments came in the first week of 2nd year juniors when we were asked to do a project entitled ‘My Summer Holidays’. As we did this every September while teacher’s blood alcohol level returned to normal, I had planned diligently and spent my summer holiday in Palma Nova collecting things that I might stick in my project book when I got back. Unfortunately for my parents and to the delight of my male classmates (and Laura Shaw, always wondered about her) I had been collecting flyers for wet t-shirt contests and Spanish prossy cards from phone boxes.

Our family holidays were just that, the whole family of uncles, cousins, aunties, nanas, great nanas and assorted school friends who’d somehow gotten the impression that this would two weeks of whores and nipples. We’d go on two of these a year, one with my mum’s side and one with my dad’s. We did once talk about assembling the entire clan into one nightmarish holiday but that fell through due to the lack of 28 bed cottages in South Devon. Mum’s side of the family are all noticeably calmer and less nuts than the Walkers so that holiday was usually at the latter end of the summer, like a gentle pear sorbet after a skunk balti.

Departure day on Walker holidays was always a bit like the opening scenes of Home Alone, with half a dozen mental kids belting around my nan’s house screaming whilst Dad, uncles and granddads got pissed and argued about the best way to drive. Satnavs have removed this problem but in 1990 it was just four blokes and a 1956 AA road map trying to decide which A road to go on to find the Dead Zone, otherwise known as our holiday destination. Because there were nearly 20 of us we could never find a big enough house and so ended up in some weird backwater with some questionable ‘rooms’ which were clearly cupboards before we arrived.

One house we stayed in was known as ‘the spooky house’ by the locals because it was a foreboding gothic mansion with 5 floors and sat on top of a hill overlooking Perranporth. It looked like the previous occupants had just been shipped in from Transylvania in wooden crates with a bed of their native earth. All of the door handles fell off, leaving you regularly trapped inside rooms, and all seven of us kids were placed in the top attic room which had no stairs, just a step ladder and a paper sign saying ‘Stairs Broken’.

In some posh hotels and villas there’s a lovely welcome basket with locally sourced produce laid out for your pleasure. In Castle Dracula Perranporth my mum opened the fridge to find a whole sea bass staring back at her and was informed that the people in the house before us had been on a fishing trip and that we were welcome to enjoy this bounty. The woman showing us round told my Aunty Janet to ‘whack its head off and just boil it’. Once she’d gone to feed the wolves my uncles went and slung it into the sea and it really did take two of them, wobbling down the hill with the creature from the deep while the townspeople laughed their tits off .

First on the agenda for any holiday taken in the UK was to find a pub with a skittle alley. For some reason my dad and his elder brothers prioritised this above all else, I have a theory that it was because it was cheap entertainment that everyone could get involved in and was just gay enough to stop them coming to blows during the inevitable final round grudge match. In Stogumber, Somerset, we had a local pub which advertised its skittle alley, but we were dismayed to learn that it was in an outbuilding that was full of tractors. The landlord promised to clean it out if we came back the next day, and sure enough we played skittles in a barn with a row of tractors staring at us and rats scuttling about whilst my nana screamed to God to save her from these unholy minions.

Holidays abroad were always just as chaotic, with the added trump card of an international airport. My uncle Stuart would always find what he called ‘a smashing hotel’ by only booking places which were advertised in German. He had an inkling that these would be the best because Germans are so stereotypically demanding, and he had a point, we stayed in some nice places. The most obvious exception was the Don Bigote, which we thought must mean ‘Mr Bigot’. It was half finished, looked nothing like its picture in Das Ferien and was packed to the rafters with German businessmen. One night we were all playing Trivial Pursuit (not even the travel version, the big original box which my grandad insisted on bringing everywhere) on the balcony of the biggest room whilst a few metres below a few dozen Germans were waiting for a coach. They kept looking up at us with suspicion every time we laughed, and at one point grandad was taking ages to ask the question on the card he had. When challenged he got flustered and started whispering “Which German city took most allied damage during the second world war?” Giggling ensued and through some fluke every question that followed was about the war, leaving the Germans below glaring as the words Kristallnacht, Goering and Rhineland floated down to them punctuated with hysterical laughter.

I won’t go into the myriad ‘incidents’, the goose stepping by my 6 year old brother in the dining room, my mum being thrown out of the Green Parrot bar in Magaluf for taking a swing at a guy selling photos with a chimp, and the night at the Spanish Evening which we now refer to only as ‘Black Fiesta’. Suffice to say that I managed to make ‘My Summer Holiday’ a thrilling read, and it eventually passed the censors with an 18 certificate for nudity and chimp related violence.

KW Senior

My dad is stood on the doorstep in the rain with a dazed look on his face and a sprig of privet hedge in his hand. He looks up, with his usual visage of incredulity and gives the feed line to what I know will be a night full of coffee drinking and gasping for air as the laughter stitch leaves us both bent double and crying ; “You’ll never guess what just happened to me!”

My dad’s blond with blue eyes, and I am not. Because of this, throughout my life I’ve been told that I’m ‘exactly’ like my mother. I am not. If you have to draw parallels between parents and their offspring you have use a better starting point than their colouring because it’s the personality traits that really hit people. Anyone who really knows me knows that I am virtually the same person as my dad. This is immediately evident to anyone who sees us drinking together. I’m basically him in a dress, which is a chilling visual to say the least.

When I was born, my dad was 19 years old. I’ve got a picture of him with shoulder length hair and a cheesecloth shirt which was taken when I was about two months old and he looks barely out of nappies himself. He was at art college studying photography, a job he does to this day. I think a lot of the foibles I picked up from him were a symptom of his youth; the obsession that he had for The Beatles and Paul McCartney fed my obsession for Suede (my Dad used to have a guilty stash of magazines that I used to think were porn but were actually issues of Record Collector) and the reason that I have always found it so easy to embark on hare-brained schemes definitely comes from his attitude of “What’s the worst that could happen?”.

Dad’s schemes ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. He’s good with this hands (something I haven’t inherited in the slightest) and once made my grandparents a wardrobe. He then decided that this would be a first rate business venture, though that one wardrobe was all he ever produced. For a whole summer in about 1993 he helped his friend set up a crazy golf course next to Pickmere Lake, which was functional but lacked aesthetic value, in fact it looked like something from Disneyland Chechnya. It was made completely of unfinished concrete and you risked serious injury in trying to retrieve wayward balls because of the bits of broken glass and nails that were lurking inside every hole.

He was also adept at spotting new technologies that would become quickly obsolete. He bought a toploading Betamax video recorder in 1982 and quickly amassed a collection of taped off the telly programmes which he carefully labelled and filed. He used to spend hours sat in front of that machine fast forwarding to accurately document what was on the tape and for how long. To this day he insists that Betmax was the higher quality format, and I have to agree with him. He had a carphone in 1988 which my friends thought was the height of sophistication, even thought it was only used about three times because the calls were 50p a minute. In 1992, four years before the first DVD players came onto the market, he had a Kodak PhotoCD player, which was possibly the most useless piece of equipment ever invented. Only professional photographers have ever heard of them for they were designed to play back photographs from files that had been digitised, and only professional photographers wanted to do that. It was never popular and was quickly replaced by a technology we now know as the ‘computer’.

Our computer was an Acorn Electron, which my dad played on for hours. His favourite game was called Sphinx Adventure which consisted of a small, badly rendered elf character trying to reach a sphinx. A typical moment of game play is as follows:

YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES

>GO LEFT

YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES

>GO RIGHT

YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES

>GO FORWARD

YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES

>GO BACK

YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES

YOU HAVE BEEN SLAIN BY A WIZARD

GAME OVER

It took him nearly four years to complete, and was rewarded by a screen saying ‘THE END’. He also enjoyed ‘Tree Of Knowledge’, a quiz game where you had to actually input all the quiz data yourself. You could spend hours building a database on Neighbours characters or Manchester City Players 1964 – 1984, only for the game to formulate questions based on this data, which you obviously already knew the answer to.

It would take me a long time to run through all of the things that make my dad my dad. I attempted it when I was best man at his wedding to my stepmum, but the speech ended up being a testimonial to the man and I binned it, thinking that stories about the notes he used to leave in my lunchbox featuring poems about the headmistress’s underwear, or the time he took payment for some photography work in the form of a rabbit would say more about my relationship with him than his with his new wife.

I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the opening paragraph – so there’s my dad, privet hedge in hand and relates to me the following tale;

“I was dropping off some photos at a woman’s house, and came back to find the car was gone. Now, my first thought was ‘The car’s been nicked’, so I went to go back inside and call the police. Just then I saw the car at the bottom of the hill parked in someone’s drive, so I went down there to see what they were playing at. The next thing, this old fella comes out ranting and raving at me, saying that my car’s ruined his hedge. Turns out I must have left that handbrake off and the car’s rolled right down the hill into the guy’s drive and only been stopped by his privet hedge. Before I know it, he’s blocked me in with his car and is getting me to sign a written confession that I have damaged his ‘valuable’ hedge. He wouldn’t let me go until I’d signed it and taken some pictures.”

“So why did you bring some of the hedge with you?”

“This? This is my evidence.”

And so goes another normal night in the life of Keith Walker.

A Kick In The Festivals

Drunkenness, class wars, casual racism and a complete rip-off. Yes, the Glastonbury Festival is the most British of events. What escapes me is how the failure of a multi-million pound company to sell out a festival in three hours should be of any concern to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

I’m sick of hearing about Glastonbury. I was sick of it before I even heard of it. Why this overblown monster, this idiot taxation system, this money-grubbing behemoth of corporate whoredom should be greeted with such dewy eyed reverence by the music fans of this country is beyond me. The news that ‘Glasto’ , as it’s bog snorkelling ‘disciples’ insist on calling it, hadn’t sold out in under 4.0 nanoseconds was greeted with more wailing and gnashing of teeth than the death of John Lennon. Could it be that the World’s Greatest Music Festival (TM and don’t you forget it you snivelling internet pirates) was losing its grip on the zeitgeist?

Well hold the phone Martha, Glastonbury isn’t on the cutting edge? You could have fooled me, they even had Shirley Bassey there last year. It was a faux-ironic move that the made the students piss themselves but which was lost on the urban youths of Hackney, which is possibly why this year, when dear Emily Eavis announced - shock horror – Jay-Z as the headliner, the regular Glastonbury crowd started burning their crosses. ‘This isn’t irony, this is just unexpected! This will not stand!’ bleated Effie and Hugo Thorntonley-Smythe as they ditched daddy’s credit card and started making plans to plant cotton fields in Ecuador instead.

Glastonbury has finally been seen for what it is, another hollow ‘experience’ for those with more disposable income than imagination to tick off their Observer Music Monthly ‘Do Before You Die’ list. It’s been a long time coming but finally the wheels have come off the Worthy Farm bandwagon. The ‘Glasto tourists’ have realised that although it might be a mildly diverting after-dinner topic to mention that they’re forgoing the South of France this year and taking the kids to ‘really experience Glastonbury’, they don’t particularly want to spend over £600 to subject Kitty and Basil to ’99 Problems’ while a load of cidered up City boys vomit on their brand new Jeff Banks tent.

The new generation of festival goers are not fooled by Glastonbury and its fake hippy ethos. They have more choice than ever before, more new festivals cropping up every year, and they go not necessarily for the lineup, but for the fun of it. Remember fun? It’s what festivals are supposed to be, a weekend away camping, listen to a few bands you might not normally bother with, have a few drinks, etc. You know, fun? Glastonbury over recent years has become more like a stint in Vietnam than a weekend break. First there’s the ridiculous notion of pre-registering, where you hand over more information to Festival Republic Ltd. than you would to a national census. Then if you’re actually lucky enough to win the ticket lottery you have to plan for the inevitable deluge where your tent and all your belongings are washed away on a river of someone else’s feculence with your only comfort being an acoustic set by The Pigeon Detectives which you can’t even hear properly. Yeah, that sounds like a blast.
Vacuous proto-hippies will claim that the best of the fest is actually away from the music, in the ridiculously contrived Field of Lost Vagueness and the Healing Fields but even they are being ploughed over this year.

The day Glastonbury failed to sell out isn’t The Day The Music Died, it’s the Day That Music Woke Up And Punched Michael Eavis In His Great Big Beardy Face. The fact that organisers believed Kings of Leon and The Verve would offer value for money demonstrates just how clueless and out of touch they have become. The Verve reunion must be the least wanted comeback since legwarmers so why foist them on an audience who were pre-pubescent when they last charted? It’s almost as if they were trying to counteract the boat-rocking signing of Jay-Z with something purposefully bland and inoffensive, like having cucumber dip with your Balti.

However, the headliners can’t be blamed for the lack of interest in Glastonbury, after all T In The Park also have The Verve and Kings of Leon and they managed to sell out, as did Leeds/Reading (The Killers, Rage Against the Machine and Metallica). The fact is that the Glastonbury ‘experience’ which cons so many into going is losing its sparkle year after year, starting with the sell off of the management to Mean Fiddler in 2002, which was brought on by the fence-jumpers and the ridiculously over populated 2001 and 1999 festivals. So in essence it was the freeloaders who killed Glastonbury, trying to force the hippy envelope and take advantage of the naïve security and the ease of spreading the ‘weak fence pole’ hints online.

If Glastonbury truly is a national treasure there needs to be a re-think on what exactly it is there to achieve. If the original aims were trampled during the Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge in 1991 when New age Travellers clashed with police, they certainly haven’t been allowed to resurface since, instead the festival has moved further and further away from the mission of free entertainment and co-operation. Personally I blame Thom Yorke, and until he’s burned in a wicker man on the Field of Lost Vagueness the ‘Glastonbury Highlights’ programme on the BBC will be mis-named.

'Darwin's Rottweiler' Needs Putting To Sleep

As a lapsed Catholic there are really only two ways I could have attended the recent Richard Dawkins lecture at the Phil and not lost my saved seat in the afterlife. 1 – stand up halfway through and yell things at him, 2 – go on a comp and claim I was just there for the free bread sticks and a nice sit down.

I chose the latter.

Professor Richard Dawkins is now a major celebrity in the world of airport bookshop theologians. His book ‘The God Delusion’ has been printed in over 30 languages and has sold in excess of 1.5 million copies. Dawkins opens his lecture with these statistics, giving you a taster of how humble and unassuming he is. He follows with a slide showing the many titles which have been written purely in opposition to his work; “The Dawkins Delusion”; “Deluded By Dawkins”; “Intellectuals Don’t Need God and Other Myths”; and so on and so forth into infinity. Dawkins laps up this attention, to him it’s just further confirmation that the religious hate to be challenged. The first ten minutes of the hour long lecture are designed to impress upon any doubters in the audience the importance of Dawkins and his theories in today’s mondo-secular society.

Not that there are many doubters here. Most of them are outside with placards, one was chanting ‘Don’t let Dawkins make a monkey out of you’, alluding to the Professors stance on creationism. Inside the largest of the Phil’s lecture rooms those who don’t fully subscribe to Dawkins’ theories are notable by their absence. Every conclusion he reaches is accompanied by a silent chorus of nods, as if he is intoning some indefatigable truth rather than shooting religious fish in a barrel. I began to wonder why these people were here, paying £20 plus to hear what they already agree with, re-packaged with slides from the book they paid a tenner for.

The myth of Dawkins is more compelling than the fact. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and though religion still plays some part in my life, usually through family ritual, I was ready for Dawkins to present me with something in the atheist position that I could agree with, or at least relate to. I was expecting this Oxford don to outsmart me in some way, to pose questions that I had no answer to. I was Dorothy, wandering down the yellow brick road to see the Wizard, and to match the analogy, I just saw an old man behind a curtain.

What Dawkins says is easy to say, make no mistake about it. Easier than telling people to ‘love thy neighbour’ certainly. He comes across not as an intellectual, or even a great speaker, but as a self-satisfied bore preaching to the converted. At one point he challenges God to strike him down with a thunderbolt – seeking attention from the deity he’s decrying as if the Almighty has nothing better to do than cut a jumped-up travelling salesman down to size.

Part of Dawkins’ problem is the dichotomy of belief vs. fact which he brings on himself and then can’t escape from. No matter how hard he tries, Dawkins can’t separate God and religion from physics and the universe. Even school aged children soon get over the idea of God as a man who lives in the sky, but Dawkins continues to rattle his bones over the lack of ‘proof’ of God’s existence. Much of his ‘lecture’ is concerned with making cheap digs at the religious, even reducing himself to mocking those who pray for their loved ones to recover from illness, literally sniggering at their belief that God has intervened when the much longed-for upturn in health arrives.

I was bored of Dawkins long before he got to the most distasteful part if the lecture, where he begins to pick away at single Biblical references. He obsesses over the Christian God and tellingly shies away from Allah, Buddha, Ganesh etc. After all, no-one likes the God he describes in ‘The God Delusion’, the Old Testament God who went Old School on the humanity after they started copulating with goats and murdering each others’ children because they were fed up. No, we like Jesus better, he even looks a bit like Brad Pitt in all those pictures and he everyone agrees her was a stand up bloke. Dawkins barely mentions Jesus, or that the basic tenets of Christianity are all concerned with being nice to each other and not breaking the law. He’d rather dwell on Genesis and the startling revelation that it MIGHT NOT ALL BE TRUE!

Throughout this lecture, Richard Dawkins never attempts to broach the simplest question of religion. Why do people believe? What exactly is in it for them? He rails against indoctrinisation but wants to indoctrinate us into atheism. He accepts no other belief system than his own, and delights in picking on the easiest of targets, like Ted Haggard, the American Evangelical preacher who was revealed to have a penchant for rent boys. It’s a good job that God hasn’t called an early judgement day because with this reasoning He might have seen Dawkins and junked us all. You can play this game with atheists too by the way, if he can ignore Mother Theresa and Father Damien of Molokai then I can ignore Baba Amte and Margaret Sanger and choose none other than Napalm Death to represent all Atheists. Don’t look so cool now do they?

During the dubious question and answer session (sample question : “Why are you so right, and where can I buy your books?”) a brave woman asked whether the survival of religion into the modern age when so much of it has been debunked by science could mean that religion has an evolutionary advantage. As you might expect, the answer was ‘I don’t know’, but it was preceded by a ridiculously complex and wordy answer which possibly only Dawkins himself will ever understand. I was bamboozled by the reply and so was the woman asking the question, as all other queries had been answered with plain English and very concisely. Dawkins had been rumbled and he pulled his secret weapon of academic waffle out the bag to send the woman back to her seat wondering why she bothered.

Comedian Matt Morgan recently compared Dawkins to Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss, commenting that his dismissal of all religiosity was similar to the woodpecker knocking the organ mice down to size with “It’s not a boat, it’s just a silly old shoe”. This sums Richard Dawkins up beautifully, he doesn’t allow for joy or hope in anything that can’t be quantified and proven. Take him to Westminster Abbey at vespers and he’ll probably prefer his own audio book on the iPod. Show him the Ali Mosque in Cairo and no doubt he’ll be tapping at the brickwork complaining it isn’t properly pointed. He may be the ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ to some, but he won’t shake of the Great and Powerful Oz analogy until he takes on some real opposition.