Zebrafish

Hello, I going to experiment with a blog for a while, it will be infrequent and just when I feel like sharing some nuggets. First off my rants on Winchester cathedral, imperialism, religion, films, pubs and playing the guitar.

Last week I was in Winchester during the Hat fair and while visiting the cathedral there besides seeing Jane Austin's grave, most of the plaques inside were for war veterens pre WW1. I found it fascinating to read of how brave these men were for fighting for the East India company and the Empire in Afghanistan, South Africa, Ghana or Pakistan. Surely they were fighting for the dominance of empire over nations with valuable resources to exploit and with lesser defensive capabilities to our guns and warships. One grave says how a man was killed by a fanatic in Peshawar sometime in the 19th century. The Pakistani family behind me looked confused and anxious at reading this, I'm not surprised.

Others talked about these brave men dieing in battle against the Ashantis or during the Boar wars where Britain invented concentration camps for the locals. The cathedral literature seemed to overlook 90% of those buried there and gave no background explanation for visitors. This is surely no surprise, I never consider Christianity or any religion for that matter to have any better morals than anyone else, its not suprising for religion, especially Christianity to be used as the justification for murder.

On a lighter note, I found a wonderful pub in Mogador, Surrey, really close to London called the Well House Inn wellhouseinn.co.uk, the well is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and the pub is 16th Century. Its almost lost in country lanes and serves a roast big enough to feed 2, and lovely too.

We watched the new film Jindabyne set in an Australian outback town near the Snowy mountains, its a very good closely observed film about human emotions under stress in a small town made paranoid by racism and a serial killer.

For anyone learning guitar I found a great site with free lessons on YouTube called JustinGuitar.com, Justin is based in Chiswick, he is quite a dude, he taught Katie Melua guitar lessons, and as well as being an excellent teacher he does stupid chocolate biscuit tricks and rants about imperialism and the delusion of religion.