Away in a manger, all plywoody and horrible

I took these photographs yesterday afternoon outside a local Roman Catholic church.

Now, obviously the church intended a thoughtful answer to their question -- it was so forcefully stencilled, after all -- so I pondered long and hard on it. My carefully considered answer:

WHAT IS MISSING?

a) a budget
b) an even rudimentary sense of aesthetics
c) a large statue of Buddha wearing a Santa hat. If I possessed either of said items, I would have definitely taken a picture of them parked in the creche to post because it would have made a most cool visual rebus of sorts.

My official answer is (d) all of the above.

I first saw this visual monstrosity during Advent and figured that, come Christmas Day, there would be a cheery wooden bundle of joy in a manger. (Well, provided the original carpenter did not fashion the Christ Child. If s/he did, then it would look less like a smiling swaddled Lord and more like a mutant chunk of plywood that it really would be kinder just to burn.)

But no. It is more than a week past Christmas now and still the horrible red sign hectors innocent passersby. The creche is ugly and empty. It suggests the sort of place where the Virgin Mary might have abandoned the infant Jesus before going back to her crack pipe. My fingers itch to fashion a curtain for the structure and stick a sign on the outside suggestion homeless people might like to kip there while the weather remains warm at night -- at least someone would get some good use out of it. Plus I wouldn't have to read that awful sign.

There's a hopeful sign on the Catholic church suggesting that it's a safe place for returning Catholics, or words to that effect. Translation: We're desperate. Thrice-divorced? Come on by! Belly up to the altar!

Sorry, but if you can't even spring for a li'l baby Jesus to lay in a fake manager to provide an answer to your own extremely abrasive and ill-painted sign, you don't deserve to survive as a religious institution. You just don't.

If they bring this out next year, I'm not responsible for the Buddha welded with industrial bolts to the wood. Or the arson charges. I'm just sayin'.

What is this blogging of which you speak?

For many years now I have refused to have a blog, on the grounds that there are far, far too many introspective arseholes cluttering up the blogosphere. I believe I used that very word, arsehole, in a detailed speech I composed on the subject. A small, perfectly formed rant that would in fact do justice to any blog.

So why am I here? I am here because of my husband.

He has said numerous times, "you should have a blog." I choose to believe this is code for "your brilliance requires a wider audience, o best beloved." Though there is a slim chance it means "turn your words into tiny pulses of electricity and banish them to a barren corner of the universe, for I can stand them pouring out of your mouth no longer, wife."

I'm also here because I spend my working life rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, otherwise known as working for a major daily newspaper. I have no illusions that the ship is going down, baby, maybe next year and maybe next decade, but someday soon, and don't you think the red chairs look a little better on the port side in the afternoon sunlight? Because I do.

It's a touch depressing to know you're working for a dying industry so I thought it would be cheering to write in a medium that's alive and kicking and still so young it keeps doing mighty poos in its pants, so to speak.

Did you spot the cavalier reference to poop in the previous paragraph? Yes, that can only mean one thing -- I am the parent of a small child. He will only feature sporadically here, usually employed to clinch an argument. He is far too young to have opinion-clinching abilities of his own, but I shall use him to give myself credibility to tell other parents what to do.

Onwards.