The headline Vatican Renews Ban On Gay Priests makes said ban sound a bit like a library book. It also doesn't make a great deal of sense. Some bishop or other was trying to explain it on "The Today Programme". You see, the Catholic Church has this rule that priests must take a vow of celibacy, regardless of their orientation. But the argument goes that homosexuals cannot be priests because they will feel sexually tempted. Now to me that implies that heterosexual priests are never sexually tempted, which is clearly rubbish. So taken to its logical conclusions, the Church should put into place a rule saying that all priests should be asexual, to ensure that they aren't distracted by sex. Oh, and here's another great argument: "Such persons in fact find themselves in a situation that presents a grave obstacle to a correct relationship with men and women". Hmm. Because Catholic priests are noted for their sympathetic and understanding attitude towards women. Aren't they?

I spent my weekend trawling various London toy departments with an 11-month-old baby who is at that stage of babydom where every now and then he gets overcome wiht excitement and flaps his arms up and down with a huge grin on his face. Most interesting was Harrods, which I had to queue for. Only in harrods could you buy, for a mere £20, a toy featuring a 10" doll in jodhpurs and a couple of plastic fences in a box proclaiming "My First Gymkhana Set".

Such pastimes are an indicator of quite how non-adventurous my life has become (actually, I would argue that fighting your way past 300 pushchairs in Hamley's actually is quite adventurous, but that aside...) As if to make the point, I went to see the new Harry Potter on Monday. I'm sure there are more interesting ways to spend an evening. We have a game we play now where we spot all the Discworld references and try to figure out whether it is down to outright plagiarism or a lack of originality. It was redeemed, however, by its depiction of the school ball, which I can assure you was accurate, and brought back fond memories of sitting forlornly at the side of the hall where the three blokes in whom you are secretly interested canoodle with other people.

A Riot Of My Own

A and E departments can be quite fun to the casual observer. It's a shame that if you're in one you're generally not in any mood to notice. You wouldn't think, for example, that UCH Casualty would be especially interesting, but look more closely and you will find the following:
- A girl who has been bitten by a lab rat and has come in for her tetanus jab.
- A man who has collapsed on the tube and is claiming to feel really dizzy, and when questioned says he has drunk "a couple of bottles of wine" but insists he "only drinks socially".
- Best of all, two chefs, sitting about four chairs away from each other, each with one finger heavily bandaged. Maybe they were going head to head (finger to finger?) in the grand final of some world record attempt for chopping vegetables that was badly risk-assessed.

The visit also helps me prepare for giving blood again, which I intend to do next week: doctors get rather too excited by blood and the one that was given the unenviable task of stitching up my partner's face after his altercation with the pavement on Eversholt Street kept tapping enthusiastically at this hard thing at the bottom of the huge slash in his chin and saying "can you hear that? Do you know what that is? It's his jawbone!"

I will never feel squeamish again.

I am not frequently awake at 3am, and since I couldn't get to sleep, and having already finished reading "Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction" turned on the World Service just in time to be told what time it was in Sydney, Geneva and Addis Ababa (handy). This was followed by a chirpy RP woman announcing "And now, a programme exploring violence and the psyche."

I've clearly been missing out.

In case you were worried, those of you who didn't manage to see Westlife standing on top of Debenhams and turning on the Christmas lights didn't miss much. For one thing, the police treated us as though we were striking miners, shoving us out of the way and shouting at us not to "fucking swear at me."
"Don't worry," the woman next to me said consolingly, because I looked a little taken aback. "If you were Brazilian he'd've shot you."

My mother feigned interest:

"Is Ronan Keating there?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because he was in Boyzone."

"Oh. Are they not the same people?"

Quite.

I have had a nice weekend, mainly because a substantial part of it was divided between a jacuzzi and a coffee bar. This was marred slightly by My Catholic's having taken it upon herself to reform the Guy's CathSoc, of which she is not a member, not being a member of the Union of which it was a part. Apparently the Catholic lay chaplain is bordering on the heretical and has isolated and "driven out" the mantilla-wearing fanatical nutbars that are Guy's Cathsoc. No great loss, I would argue. Anyway, their new aim appears to be to drive out Joan, on the basis that she isn't a bloke in a dress and doesn't think non-Catholics should be burned at the stake. On the upside, My Catholic claims that God isn't speaking to her at the moment, and as a result He has rather gone up in my estimation.

I don't have any news as such, perhaps because I don't have a life as such. Friday was good, though, with the early part spent drinking decaf with soya milk (coffee shops are not really designed for migraine-suffers) with my boss accompanied by the dulcet tones of Jeff Buckley and Sarah McLachlan in a branch of Starbucks that felt a bit like someone's living room. The second part was spent listening to Mark Thomas, who has come out with such gems as:

"I am not a cynic, but a realist: when I was six, my mother said to me "every time you tell a lie, a fairy dies". I replied "fine, show me the bodies."

and

"How does Al Quaeda recruit? Do they infiltrate the Samaritans? "I want to kill myself." "Great! Do you have your own rucksack?"

If you haven't seen Mark Thomas live, I would highly recommend it, particularly if, like us, you can wangle the best seats for free.

According to this "Which book of the Bible are You" quiz I am the Book of Romans. Unsurprisingly this is not a hugely welcome piece of information on a week when I have had a killer migraine and a half-cut acquaintance coming on to me whilst extolling the virtues of the Labour Party. Jeremiah would have been my preferred outcome; maybe even 1 John; or even Revelation, for a laugh. But the product of an uptight, authoritarian know-all who thinks gossipping is a sin?

On the up side, I got a nice letter from Soho this week telling me they didn't want me play, but it was nevertheless "endearing and intimate" - nice because here was I thinking the variation on a theme "boy meets girl, boy becomes vicar" wouldn't catch on. The letter then proceeded to tell me what my play was about, which was not any great revelation to me, then tell me who my characters are ("your characters - the Northern working class boy and the middle class girl from Bristol...") They then invited me to attend a workshop I have already attended and rashly told me I was welcome to send in more work. So I have sent them "Hell and High Tide" - If Graffiti didn't put them off, that probably will.

Julie Burchill pisses me off. She presented some whiney rant about chavs the other day, the gist of which was we are all classist because we take the piss out of chavs, and that derogatory terms like chav are restricted to the working class. Such other terms as luvvies, Sloanes, Nimbys and Yuppies were pointed out to her, but apparently we can take the piss out of these social stereotypes because they have money, and anyway, they ask for it. So there you go. If you are a wanker and rich, you've got in coming. If you are a wanker and poor then you are simply the unfortunate and inevitable product of an elitist, post-Thatcherite society. Your hoodie-wearing, monosyllabic expolits are thus no fault of your own.

I would like to point out that my post-Thatcherite self does not wear a hoodie and can manage sentences with more than one word, and on a good day, sentences with words of three plus syllables! And my post-Thatcherite cousins are the same.

Nice things are happening. For a start, the visa deadline is now over and I am relaxing in my office with a bag of pistachio nuts. Secondly, the hole that is Camden's Amphill Estate, on which I based Sukina's block in "Grafitti", is apparently undergoing some sort of facelift, and there are signs everywhere saying nice mysterious but optimistic Laboureseque things like "Working to improve communities". I don't think it's the community that's the problem, but anyway, we'll see what happens.

Finally Helmut Kohl, about whom I know little but am warming to by the second, has apparently published an autobiography which makes Margaret Thatcher look like a bit of a pillock. Apparently (or so says the Today Programme, so it must be true) she was so against the reunification of Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall that she stamped her feet and made some statement about "we beat the Germans twice, we can do it again", and threatened to veto it. Ahh, those were the good old days.

As it's All Souls, (if you don't know what that is you skip ahead to the Horror Bunnies) I am going to break my No Sentimentalism rule and emblazon my blog with the names of the following: my grandparents Eva Garthwaite and Alfred and Molly Mackwood, great aunt Kathleen, Jesse Scarfe and Julia McCord (family friends) and Kirsty McPhie and Ashleigh Robinson (school friends.)

On a slightly lighter note, I was watching some rubbish on sky at the weekend about what makes a scary horror films. This link provides quite a good synopsis of some of the front runners, and is preferable for people like me who have little interest in horror films.