McCann: Nasty Habits

There are nice nuns. I have met a few. But then again…

Generally speaking, nuns are a black-hearted lot. The Irish orders’ refusal to cough up compo for the cruelty inflicted on caged girls in the Magdalene “homes” is standard operating procedure. Admit nothing, plead poverty, and when all else fails – lie.
In recent weeks, they have taken some stick for this bad-mindedness. But that won’t worry them. Any more than bishops feel a frisson of concern at condemnation of their connivance in the rape of children. Couldn’t give a toss, any of them.
That, in the end, goes for the soft-edged progressives, too, who are heaped high with praise when they “speak out” against the “abuses”.
What they all have in common is a belief that the Catholic Church embodies God. So one tendency sees the savagery as the work of flawed individuals atypical of the institution, the other as resulting from the institution itself having strayed from the right path. But all fervently believe that the “true” Church is the only repository of ultimate Truth.
It is this conception of the Church which insulates its representatives from the law of the land and from normal standards of human behaviour. Clergy who make a show of condemning abuse while professing fealty to the Church as they would like it to be defy logic and truth. To complain about the behaviour of priests, bishops or nuns while refusing to call for the extirpation of the Church makes no sense.
Only atheists can be trusted to talk straight about religion.

Where did they get all the early footage of Rod Stewart for the BBC2 “Imagine” slot last month? Rod at home above the corner sweet shop with his mum and dad, teenage Rod dithering in a draper’s about shirts, Rod playing what looked like an under-14 match on a muddy pitch…
Who was following him around, presumably with an 8mm camera? He wasn’t even in a band at that stage.
He came across as personally and professionally fulfilled and totally contented. And loaded, of course. His eight children by five partners – aged 50 to two – seemed at ease with one another and obviously adore him.
He has had an astonishing career, from Long John Baldry to song-book crooner by way of Jeff Beck and The Faces. Nobody will ever persuade me to sing along with “Sailing” or prise my hands from my ears at “D’Ya Think I’m Sexy”. But I won’t desert “Stay With Me” again.
Then there was the Glasgow Celtic connection. He has a full-size replica of Celtic Park in the back garden of his Los Angeles gaff, as you do. Pat Doherty from across our street says – she knows about these things, having worked for Celtic before moving over and establishing our ticket connection – that he took Celtic’s head grounds-man out to LA for a month to make sure the re-creation was accurate.
He’ll be back in these parts next year with Ian McLagan, Kenny Jones and Ronnie Wood, a blast from the past Facing into the future.

So that’s that for Glasgowbury then. I didn’t make the second night on account of Bruce Springsteen wanting to see me in Belfast. But I caught enough of Friday to preserve memory of the unique and wonderful thing Paddy Glasgow and Stella and Dermot created at Eagle’s Rock in the high Sperrins.
Glasgowbury combined the strut and pizzazz of a mega event with the easy intimacy of Sandino’s Back Room. It has been an event for bands as much as for its audience, had the character of an annual convention of Northern musicians, all of whom loved and looked forward to the occasion. It provided the experience of playing a proper festival for bands normally confined to pub gigs and practice rooms. Its importance for the development of the Northern scene will eventually be recognised.
I spent the last couple of hours timing my trek from Little Bear to Jetplane Landing to Paddy Nash and the Enchiladas to slabs of sound smashed into my face by And So I Watch You From Afar. Then we skipped homeward along adventurous roads, a big moon glowing on the velvet hills.

The first-ever recorded chat-up line was “neferwi-pehwi-ki”, in a 1,800 BC poem in which one male Egyptian god compliments another: “Nice ass.”
I learnt this at the British Museum’s “A Little Gay History” feature, where I was also able to gaze upon the Funerary Papyrus of Henuttaway portraying a number of men performing acts of quite remarkable suppleness for the viewing pleasure of High Priestess Henuttaway.
There’s a pottery lamp from 1st century Turkey showing female lovers gifting one another oral sex: no sign of a high priest in the vicinity, though.
The museum trail takes us from ancient Greece to the Han dynasty, to a range of pre-Columbian societies, to Tamil Nadu, medieval Japan, renaissance Italy, Babylon, the Siberian tundra, Persia, Mali, Tahiti, and Maori New Zealand, all the way back to the hunter-gatherer societies of a dozen millennia ago who have left us exquisite stone figures of female caressing and phallic entanglement.
I also learnt that to be a lesbian you don’t have to have a cat.
I complained to an official on the way out that Ireland didn’t get a mention. Well, she replied after a pause, they are a bit strange over there.