Ship of fools

If you want some humour with your religion then you could do worse than try www.shipoffools.com which labels itself as 'The Magazine of Christian Unrest'. Here you can join in the search for a pizza with the face of Our Lord on it, create your own Virgin Mary piece of toast and see some very good religious cartoons. You can even buy a Virgin Mary memory stick. Then if you click on one of the links it will give you some interesting facts about today in history. One of the snippets for today - 17 December - is as follows:

It is St Olympias's Day, a wealthy widow who gave vast amounts to the poor and became a deaconness in John Chrysostom's Constantinople. She is chiefly celebrated for making things difficult for John's successor after he was deposed.

You can also buy a St Laurence pincushion to recreate his torment of being tied to a tree and having arrows fired at him. In appallingly bad taste I know but I could not resist a chuckle at some of the stuff on there. I could not help thinking that it would have been taken down long ago if it had been about any other religion . . .

I have done the last of my Christmas shopping today - mainly food bits and pieces. Once I get my Tesco order tomorrow, that will be it for us. Anything else we don't have we'll have to do without. I need to make some pork and apple sausage rolls but that is definitely it this year. Surprisingly enough the smallish - 25,000 population - local town where we went this morning to shop, was relatively quiet. We had deliberately picked 8.30am as being a quiet time, but hadn't expected it to be quite that empty.

The supermarkets, and Marks & Spencer Simply Food, all seemed to be stacked to the rafters with no one buying. I can only presume there will be a stampede later in the week - which I intend to avoid.

I'm not due back at work now until 2 weeks on Wednesday and I intend to make the most of my time off - reading and maybe even writing as well as surfing the net without one eye on clock like I usually do.

Off to read some more of Rosy Thornton's 'Hearts and Minds' - about a man in a woman's world.