SKIPPER, the half-breed dog I had when I was a child, was a practising Roman Catholic. Let out of the house of a morning he would make his way to St Bernadette’s Church and sit in the porch with a peaceable, slightly smug expression on his face. I know, because on several occasions I followed him. Always ended up at St Bernadette’s.
Maybe he was angling to go to confession: “Shagged a peke, was sick in the kitchen, unable to resist eating other dogs’ excrement.” Three Hail Marys, Skipper, and ponder long on your behaviour.
My mother, when I told her about the St Bernadette’s stuff, was convinced our dog’s motives were different from those I had assumed. “He is there to bite any taigs that come along, and quite rightly. He is as affronted by the Whore of Rome as the rest of us, Rod. Perhaps more so.”
But that did not fit with the serene expression on Skipper’s face. He did not resemble the Reverend Ian Paisley. He did not froth or snarl. He was at peace when in St Bernadette’s, both before and after we had his balls cut off.
The possibility that some animals believe in God and perhaps have developed primitive religious rites and ceremonies is back in the news. Last week a biologist revealed that she saw chimps worshipping at a tree.
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Next week some anthropologist will argue, with great force, that voles follow the Nicene Creed or that beavers are monogamous because of their strict Presbyterian upbringing, rather than because it is evolutionarily advantageous.
The chimp stuff was noticed by an Irish scientist called Laura Kehoe. She was in Guinea watching chimpanzees. She noticed a scarred tree, in front of which there was a pile of stones. What’s all that about, she wondered.
And then she saw the chimps approach the tree. Some hurled stones at it with fury, others built a “primitive cairn” next to its trunk. Ah, it is a sacred tree and they are making a shrine of it, she concluded — a little peremptorily.
I suppose throwing rocks at a tree does resemble, a little, the Muslim ritual of “stoning the devil” on the hajj during Eid al-Adha, in which pious Muslims pelt three walls with seven stones apiece. Laura did not make this connection — perhaps because buried within her is a certain valuable instinct for survival. I have mentioned it because, of late, I have become bored with my head and do not much mind being separated from it.
Cue a certain amount of hysteria. The scientists are supposedly “baffled” by this strange chimp behaviour. But not sufficiently baffled to prevent themselves from reaching the most unlikely of conclusions — that chimps might believe in some form of vengeful and boringly static deity. All hail the not-very-tall African tree god. The notion that the chimps enjoyed throwing stones at a tree and also enjoyed building small piles of stones because they are lovable cretins does not seem to have occurred to them.
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It does not matter how eminent the biologist or anthropologist, there is always a tendency to anthropomorphise animal behaviour. The most eminent of them all — the Canadian anthropologist Lionel Tiger — was not immune. He wondered if chimps held religious services of a morning after breakfast when they sat down quietly for a while, rather than thinking they were simply letting their food digest in a sensible manner.
The suspicion is that the more narcissistic we become in our behaviour, the greater our propensity to insist that these idiotic traits are shared by animals, as if this exculpated us all. In 1930s Germany a school was founded to “realise” the potential of dogs: the Hundesprechschule. These dogs did amazing things. One of them, when asked who Adolf Hitler was, responded in fluent German: “Mein Führer!” According to the SS, at least. If you bend your ears hard enough all dogs say “Mein Führer”, or something close.
We are the only mammals possessed of those arguably interconnected concepts — wishful thinking and religious belief.
Justice is blind (drunk)
Two prominent London lawyers were caught having a bit of how’s yer father, m’lud, outside Waterloo station. The woman — a barrister — was seen with her knickers around her ankles. Or briefs. I suppose you could say they’d been taken down and used in evidence — because both were arrested and held in the cells for a night.
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I can tell you the name of the man — it’s Graeme Stening, 51, of Windlesham, Surrey. I can also tell you his wife’s name, the price of his house and what sort of law he practises. But I can’t tell you the name of the lovely lady barrister because six weeks after she accepted a caution she decided she had been the helpless victim of an “assault”. She had been too drunk to consent, she retrospectively argued. And thus too drunk to accept a caution. And therefore she can never be named, ever. But don’t dare to call the law an ass . . .
Next on BBC1, the Great British Nuke Off
This is a grim and merciless world and so sometimes I am left short of humorous items for this column. When that happens I always tap two names into Google, knowing that whatever comes up will have me ROFL, as the young people say. Those two names are Kim Jong-un and Alan Yentob. Never fail to get a laugh. Especially Botney.
Last week he appeared at the migrant camp in Calais, apparently dressed in his pyjamas. There he was, wandering around with a deeply serious expression on his face, feeling everyone’s pain in a very real sense. He is making a programme about the musical accomplishments of these migrants — so that’s something to look forward to, no?
Meanwhile, Kim has told his military chiefs to be ready to nuke the world at any given moment. Perhaps he came to this somewhat extreme decision when he heard about Alan’s programme and wished only to spare our misery.
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I sometimes wonder if they should do a job swap. Botney, given nuclear weapons, would keep the world on its toes. And Kim could only improve the BBC. I’m sure we would all enjoy watching the recidivist middle managers taken out to the Blue Peter garden and blown to smithereens with heavy ordnance. Imagine, indeed.
Oh, Salford, you bunch of duckers
It is now illegal to swear when you are in Salford. The council there is threatening to issue fines to people who use “foul and abusive language” when they are wandering around Salford Quays. I cannot imagine walking past the BBC’s multimillion-pound headquarters there without using foul and abusive language, so I suppose I shall have to stay away. I would imagine the entire population of Greater Manchester feels much the same.
The campaigning organisation Liberty has, rather wittily, asked if it is OK to use language that is foul but not abusive, or abusive but not foul. And also if it is OK to swear in Salford, in a thoroughly unpleasant manner, when nobody can hear you.
Winkle pickers
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Apparently the latest hotspot for “dogging” is the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington. Couples have been turning up and going at it hammer and tongs. As one respected dogging website put it, with great enthusiasm: “It doesn’t get dirtier than this!”
I remember Bridlington as a pleasant, if a little faded, resort where you could get a nice bowl of winkles for next to nothing. No change there, then.
It is also where the new film of Dad’s Army was shot. “They don’t like it up ’em, they don’t like it up ’em!” Au contraire, Corporal Jones, au contraire.