Pot-pourri, some of it seasonal

Wonderful notes, but a bit wide of the mark?

It’s the time of year - when could be better? - for listening to Bach’s wonderful Christmas Oratorio. 

I particularly love the section ‘prepare thyself Zion’. In magnificent uplifting song, Bach calls on the nation to be ready for great joy. But which nation is that? Why, it’s Zion, the spiritual home of the Jews. And the joy? Why, it’s for the birth of Christ. So, in some of the most glorious music Bach wrote, and by that token some of the most glorious music ever written, Bach calls on the Jews to celebrate the founding event of the Christian religion.

How can you avoid admiring Bach's sense of music? Second to none. His sense of spiritual significance? Probably right up there with the best. His sense of irony? Well, could perhaps have tried harder.

One more for my occasional series on toiletries: this WC is not disabled.

There was a time when toilets that could be used by people in wheelchairs were referred to as ‘handicapped’. But as that term came to be seen as pejorative, it was replaced by ‘disabled’, leading to glorious notices proclaiming ‘disabled toilet’, which ought to have made any possible users nervous about trying their luck.

But now I see that we refer to them as ‘accessible’. Which suggests that toilets for relatively able-bodied people should perhaps be inaccessible.

They might be up on the roof somewhere, offering a challenge to prove that users really are able bodied. While also providing them with the opportunity for a little exercise.

The Chancellor regrets

Saw a glorious sign in a hospital yesterday. It was on a blocked door, closing off access to a whole corridor. And I could hardly imagine anything more appropriate.

Appropriate. And not before time

George Osborne, our esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer, as we Brits quaintly like to call our Minister of Finance, has been building himself quite a reputation for closing the doors of opportunity and blocking off the way through to hope. And hospitals are a lot of the punishment.

Has he finally at least found the decency to apologise for the pain he’s causing?

A safe haven, but short on appeal

At the risk of making it look as though I spend a disproportionate amount of time in our smallest roomw, I can’t resist the opportunity to share another toilet sign with you.

It read ‘Out of order. Please do not use.’

What’s special about that, I hear you ask? We see it all the time. Very irritating it is too, but profoundly banal.

Ah, but you’ve missed the point, I reply. This sign was on the inside of the door. What it was saying was ‘this loo is absolutely fine, but out there things are seriously messed up. Probably best not to take the chance of going back.’

Probably good advice

Not far off the mark, I’d say. Probably good advice. Sadly, though, even if I do spend longer in toilets than is strictly customary, I have to confess that I find the possibilities they offer frankly limited. Not that attractive a spot in which to take refuge from the evils of the world.

So I screwed up my courage and plunged back out into the maelstrom we call daily life. Scary stuff, but more entertaining.

Still, I appreciate the advice from the lavatory. Nice to know someone is looking out for us that way.

Toiletries

‘This toilet is reserved for the use of Intellect’ read the sign on the door.

Putting the works of the mind in their place

Now I have certain pretensions to intellectualism – purely amateur, you understand, I remain a mere dilettante – but I have to admit that the sign may convey a particular, and fundamental, truth .

If you'll excuse my bad language, I'm afraid that I've read rather a lot of intellectual work which I'd have to describe as such a pile of crap that I can only assume the author is simply taking the piss. It therefore seems particularly appropriate and insightful to reserve a toilet specifically for intellectual use.

Of course, the toilet may be only for the use of visitors to an organisation that has chosen to call itself, perhaps a trifle pretentiously, ‘Intellect’, and whose offices I happened to be visiting. But how much duller an explanation that would be - I reject it out of hand as unfit to puncture the monotony of the everyday.

The sign put me in mind of a note of Voltaire’s which I have never been able to track down, but would nonetheless like to believe was by him: ‘Sir, I am in the smallest room in the house. Your letter is before me. Soon it will be behind me.’

Postscript on a related subject: after a conference dinner tonight, the speaker who happens to be doctor, told the story of a visit to a toilet in the Department of Health building in London. Written across the cubicle door were the words ‘2000 people work here. Right now, you are the only one who knows what he is doing.’

He also described life as a bowl of shit, and a doctor’s role as steering patients to the shallow end. Not perhaps the most noble description I’ve heard of medicine, or of life for that matter, but is it wholly without merit?