I have been living with my parents again for a month now. The reason is that I will be unemployed until October and so I can't afford to pay rent elsewhere. Living with the parents again is an interesting experience.
In my family, we generally say grace before eating (except when we are in a restaurant, eating in front of the TV or we have a guest who has decided to go ahead and start eating before anybody has had a chance to say grace).
Every time I visit my parents they ask me to say the grace. This is just something they do. They like everybody to contribute and so any family member who hasn't been around in a while is asked to say grace.
In our house, grace is formulaic. We first started saying grace at meal-times when I was about 11 (I think) and we were encouraged to say whatever we felt was appropriate. As a result, the standard grace formula in the McCann household was conceived by a child more than twelve years ago, and yet that is the model that my brothers and sister (and myself up until recently) have followed ever since. I often think that visitors to the house must be either surprised at the fact that we say grace at mealtimes or surprised that the grace is so uninspired and meaningless.
As a result of this, I started playing around with the formula a few years ago. After a while I came up with a new formula, which pleased me because it was so general and ambiguous. Essentially, it was "Thanks, God, for the food, the stuff, the things and the etcetera". Other words, such as "junk", can be added to taste.
The point I was making here was, of course, that it doesn't matter what is said during the grace because it is so formulaic and repetitive that it is completely meaningless anyway. If we were truly grateful for what we had received, we would probably sound a lot more sincere. When somebody buys me a meal, or when a friend cooks me dinner, I am very thankful because I appreciate the effort involved. When my mother makes me dinner, I am thankful to her (even if I rarely actually thank her for it - I'm a bad son, but that's a whole different story) but I am in no way thankful to a deity in a different plane of existence.
Those of you who know me well will consider that there is nothing unusual about this statement as I do not believe in the Christian god, or even in any of the traditional notions of "God". But even if I did believe in the white bearded man in the sky wearing the nightdress, I don't see why he should be thanked merely for creating the means by which we feed ourselves. If you're going to go down the road of thanking him (yes, God is a man and no, it doesn't matter that he's a man because he doesn't exist - call him "her" and "she" if it really makes you feel better) for creating life-supporting elements, then why don't we thank him for every breath of oxygen? Or for every drink of water? I'm not bashing the notion of being grateful but if there is a God, I think he would wonder why we're so pleased about the food and not quite so impressed with, for instance, the gravitational force that is also an essential part of our life (at least, it is for now - a disclaimer for the Arthur C. Clarke fans among you).
So what I'm trying to say is that the very idea of saying grace is pointless and naïve. It is even more pointless to recite a meaningless phrase before you eat. It is of about the same value as tapping a can of beer before opening it - some people believe it helps in an unknown way, others think it is a waste of time.
My parents are Christians and they therefore won't listen to rational thought about matters of religion (a fact that never ceases to amaze me) because they don't need to know why they know something if they know it hard enough (if you catch my drift). As a result, they probably won't accept my preceding argument as a valid reason not to say grace, so I have hatched a plan. It is based on the idea of doing something so incredibly badly that you are never asked to do it again. Essentially, the idea is to say grace whenever it is required of me, but to thank the wrong god consistently. So today, I thanked Shiva for providing us with haddock for dinner. The last time it was Odin and before that Thor. I will go through Lugh, Zeus and Baal and, if that doesn't work, I will test the water with Hades before dropping the bomb: thanking our Dark Lord, Satan.
I expect that at some stage over the next few weeks, I will be quietly removed from the grace-saying roster. If I die from salmonella in the next couple of months, feel free to say "I told you so".
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
I don't like Wicklow
Wicklow has never been known as a bastion of intellectual thought. I attended the local boys' secondary school here. I would estimate that less than 20% of the guys from my class are now college graduates. I would also estimate that less than 20% of my teachers were college graduates, but I'm reliably informed that it is a requirement for getting a job as a teacher.
The point of this is that there are occasional moments in Wicklow when something happens to bring home the notion that the town is essentially one large community for the hard of thinking.
Today I went to the local Super Valu to buy some lunch. I approached the deli counter, presented the girl with my best smile (it's a good one reserved solely for people who are about to make me a sandwich) and requested a chicken fillet baguette with wedges. There are some who might not be familiar with the chicken and wedges roll, but it's a reasonably straightforward request and not particularly uncommon or difficult to make. Essentially, it involves cutting up some chicken, placing it in a baguette and adding wedges on top of it.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when the deli counter girl responded to my request with a simple "no". I immediately retracted my best smile and replaced it with my most persuasive smile. I pointed out that all the necessary ingredients were present in abundant numbers and offered to share the recipe with her, if necessary (my cheeky smile was employed for this last comment).
She failed to see the humour of this and impatiently told me that she was not permitted to make a roll with chicken and wedges in it. I couldn't believe this. This means that there is a deli counter in Wicklow that considers the combination of chicken and wedges between two slices of bread to be so problematic that they have made it an officially proscribed sandwich. Perhaps they can't afford to train their staff to produce sandwiches with more than one ingredient.
I switched to my disbelieving smile and made the point that this position was a bit ridiculous. This was met with a tut, a sigh and an announcement that that was the way of things and that if I had a problem with it I was welcome to speak to the manager. In her defence, I suppose it's OK that she treated me like a piece of dirt she had found on the underside of her shoe. After all, I'm only a paying customer who has requested that she put two of the ingredients on offer in a roll. Obviously she doesn't get paid enough to deal with that kind of nonsense.
The manager approached, unbidden. He was a big hulking sort of man who looked like he should be pulling a plough across a field or forging swords on an anvil (actually, this is an unfair statement - obviously I'm just intimidated by a man with the sort of skill required to be the manager of an entire deli counter in a small town in Wicklow who still manages to find the time to come up with such inspired policies as "no wedges with chicken"). He came over and stood uncomfortably close - the way older, bigger guys do in school when they want to intimidate you - and asked me what my problem was. I explained my predicament and he confirmed that it was indeed the case that it was their policy not to make the Sandwich That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I made the point that this appeared, on the surface, not to make an awful lot of sense. He shrugged and looked at me as if to say "do you want to make something of it?" and so I thanked him for his cooperation and went to the Centra on the main street, where I bought a chicken fillet and wedges roll.
The point of this is that there are occasional moments in Wicklow when something happens to bring home the notion that the town is essentially one large community for the hard of thinking.
Today I went to the local Super Valu to buy some lunch. I approached the deli counter, presented the girl with my best smile (it's a good one reserved solely for people who are about to make me a sandwich) and requested a chicken fillet baguette with wedges. There are some who might not be familiar with the chicken and wedges roll, but it's a reasonably straightforward request and not particularly uncommon or difficult to make. Essentially, it involves cutting up some chicken, placing it in a baguette and adding wedges on top of it.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when the deli counter girl responded to my request with a simple "no". I immediately retracted my best smile and replaced it with my most persuasive smile. I pointed out that all the necessary ingredients were present in abundant numbers and offered to share the recipe with her, if necessary (my cheeky smile was employed for this last comment).
She failed to see the humour of this and impatiently told me that she was not permitted to make a roll with chicken and wedges in it. I couldn't believe this. This means that there is a deli counter in Wicklow that considers the combination of chicken and wedges between two slices of bread to be so problematic that they have made it an officially proscribed sandwich. Perhaps they can't afford to train their staff to produce sandwiches with more than one ingredient.
I switched to my disbelieving smile and made the point that this position was a bit ridiculous. This was met with a tut, a sigh and an announcement that that was the way of things and that if I had a problem with it I was welcome to speak to the manager. In her defence, I suppose it's OK that she treated me like a piece of dirt she had found on the underside of her shoe. After all, I'm only a paying customer who has requested that she put two of the ingredients on offer in a roll. Obviously she doesn't get paid enough to deal with that kind of nonsense.
The manager approached, unbidden. He was a big hulking sort of man who looked like he should be pulling a plough across a field or forging swords on an anvil (actually, this is an unfair statement - obviously I'm just intimidated by a man with the sort of skill required to be the manager of an entire deli counter in a small town in Wicklow who still manages to find the time to come up with such inspired policies as "no wedges with chicken"). He came over and stood uncomfortably close - the way older, bigger guys do in school when they want to intimidate you - and asked me what my problem was. I explained my predicament and he confirmed that it was indeed the case that it was their policy not to make the Sandwich That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I made the point that this appeared, on the surface, not to make an awful lot of sense. He shrugged and looked at me as if to say "do you want to make something of it?" and so I thanked him for his cooperation and went to the Centra on the main street, where I bought a chicken fillet and wedges roll.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
