Miscellaneous Miscellaneous Miscellaneous.

What is the etymology of miscellaneous? I tried googling it but all I'm getting is the etymology for various other words found throughout the english language, Like "albatross", which stems from the portugese Alcatraz (yes, like the prison) which in turn is thought to come from arabic al-qādūs, or الغطاس which aparently (but I've found it difficult to fact check this) means (or used to mean) something like "The diver"

Flowers for Algernon

its a really very good book. go and read it

note to self:

Non newtonian fluid foods and/or drinks?

my haiku joke

I will now only.

Speak in Haikus bang bang bang.

Bang bang bang bang bang.

Incredibly funny witisism #394

All the forums/tutorials for creating/maintaining websites involve these newfangled intuitive website makers like squarespace or wix. So everytime I look up a solution to a problem I'm having I feel like I'm walking into a phone repair shop with a clay tablet written in babylonian cuniform

Most expensive cigar

The Gurkha Royal Courtesan, made with rare himalayan tabbaco and infused with Louis XIII cognac. It's wrapped in gold leaf and studed with diamonds. 1.34 ish million pounds.

Lesbian Eyeware

Did you know that monocles are (or at least used to be ) lesbian dogwhistles. To such an extent that a lesbian bar is paris was named "le monocle"

Money Investment B2B forward back to you on this

Differently categorised websites will have diffrent RPMs. Categories like finance, property and tech tend to have very nice RPM. That's because advertisers infer from the subject material that the kind of people gravitating to that website are more likely to have money and be willing to spend it. Websites under entertainment or social media tend not to have particulary lovely RPMs because the advertisers infer that the people on there are probably going to be a bit slobish and not have as much money to spend. The way that the categorisation for a website is determined is usually decided by algorithms , sometimes as simple as a wordsearch (eg, If "money present >= 3 times sort into finance"). Though increasingly LLMs are being used to grasp a wider contextual theme of the website. This is important for me because after all I did make this website for the exspress purpose of making heaps of wonderfull money. I've made the mistake of including things that probably wont sort me into a very favourable CPM category, if I had to guess I think that this website will be sorted into education or blog. Not terrible but not great either. To fix that I'm going to want to include a lot more content about money, or at least content that generaly appeals to Rich yet non-miserly people

And Then There Were Two

Prologue

This is a short story I wrote for an art competition. It was a while ago and I don't like it, I think it's a bit cringy.

start

At 23:47 On new years eve of 2024 an identical landmass to the greater British isles appeared, a reflection to the east. Satellite data collected at the time indicated that while the mainland appeared instantaneously, the isle of white appeared roughly 20 minutes later, the isle of man, then some of the larger archipelagos surrounding north Scotland. Over the next couple of hours smaller, often uninhabited islands appeared. Shipping vessels at the time located where the landmass appeared have not been seen since, all broadcast messages from them cut out at the same time as the land masses they would have been replaced by arrived.

My uncle owned a small fishing boat in Solva. The next day he and I went immediately together on the boat going west. We would have gone earlier but by the time we had heard the news on the night in question he and I (the only ones in the family licensed to sail the boat) were tired and drunk, not dangerously just satisfyingly.

His father, my grandfather, had died at sea due to tiredness while sailing. Since then, we all felt very safety conscious. Once we woke up early in the morning, sobered, slept and curious we set to the dock, where many people had had exactly the same idea. Some boat owners were charging fees for others to join them. There was a lot of demand yet not a lot of supply, so the fees soared, seeming to get larger and larger each time we overheard haggling along the dock. We considered bringing someone ourselves, we could have done with the money. We decided not to, again, for maybe slightly paranoid safety concerns. It wasn't likely that a stranger brought on to the boat would for some reason try to crash it, likely killing us and themselves, but grief does funny things to you. Besides, I thought to myself privately, as did, I suspect my uncle “something like this, something as astounding and mind bending as this, is the sort of thing best viewed for the first time in good, known company”. Also, the boat was quite small, I didn't want a stranger breathing down my neck as I witnessed my first miracle

As we detoured around Ireland, the sheer volume of people and boats on the sea astounded me. For the first time in my life I saw traffic on the Atlantic ocean, or at least what used to be the Atlantic ocean, I suppose by then it would be defined as a gulf or a channel. There were also helicopters, some planes, though it was hard to gauge if the airplanes were going west for the same reason as us, or if it was just coincidence. The Baader Meinhof effect is what's called a frequency illusion. It seemed to me like there were many planes in the sky, but then how often did I notice how many planes there were in the sky when I wasn't looking for them. 5 chem trails, that might be a lot of planes? then again it might be very few?

We listened to the news on the wireless as we took shifts operating the boat through the herd our boat had incorporated itself into. The new island had appeared 7 hours earlier. Though apparently the government had not caught on to a whole land mass appearing at their front door until 5 hours and 40 minutes ago. Not because they didn't notice it, but because for that hour and 20 minutes everyone was convinced that there had been a malfunction in software, or a cyber-attack. On the wireless, the government was facing serious backlash from the public, the opposition, and other governments for their tardy response time to this security issue. “Cut them some slack” I couldn't help but think, I was by no means a supporter of the government, certainly not of the prime minister or most of the ministers. I certainly wasn't a radical but if I saw the opportunity to blame the government for misgivings, I would certainly take it. I wouldn't be scared to “hold them accountable”. Yet even I, a quite severe critic of the government, thought “fair enough”. I could not fault them for that. I still think it is absurd to hold them to such an account. The government had done a lot of stupid incompetent things before and since and surely will again, but I could not see this being one of them. It's like attacking a parent for not anticipating that their child spontaneously combusts upon contact with yellow paint on a Thursday. Who could have possibly anticipated that? This questioning of the government continued for an hour or so, before the message changed dramatically. “Avoid the new British Isles. Stay away from them.”

The tone of the messages issued did not seem antagonistic. There was no mention of criminal charges or punishment for going there. I suspect because the government fully knew it was not reasonable to arrest or stop an entire nation from satisfying their curiosity. This was further confirmed to me when they began saying, I’m paraphrasing here “Avoid the new British Isles. stay away from them. But if you are going, here's what you should know and do.”

The advice included: stay away from London (the other one), bring a Geiger counter if possible, bring whatever kind of protective clothing you have. weapons could be brought but should not be used unless in self-defence.

eventually it became clear there was no viable way of stopping people from going there, it was too close, too large and too accessible, the government let go of all pretext of authority over the second British Isles and just tried to equip those doubtless to go as well as they could, minimising casualties

Then they began describing the population there. From the various accounts given by members of the public and satellite imagery posted on the news and social media, the phrase I’d been told as a child regarding spiders sprung to mind “they’re more scared of you than you are of them”

While all of this was happening, we were maybe 30 minutes or so out from Castletown-Bearhaven, the other Castletown-Bearhaven that is. We thought we could see land, the land but then again it might have actually been some of the many boats ahead of us. My uncle and I began exchanging glances, concerned ones. We asked one another if the other was still comfortable doing this, if maybe they wanted to go back. Though we did this for one another, the concern I had shown was largely performative and so, as he admitted to me later, was my uncles. that is to say we truly wished that the other would be free to stop if this was no longer what they’d signed up for. but inside we were brimming with excitement, hiding it from one another so as to not seem insensitive to the situation.

The dialog went a bit like this:

“You know, this sounds pretty bad, maybe we should stay out of this, do you want to turn back?”

“No, no. Do you?”

“No, No. Unless you want to?”

“No, I’m just saying I would understand if you did”

Truly, we were both brimming with excitement. Despite the grizzly state of the citizens of the second British Isles and the sights of suffering, we felt like we were living a childhood fantasy, sailing on the high seas to go to an unexplored, foreign yet familiar land where a Geiger counter was needed. a Geiger counter. we knew what that meant, radiation, mutation, mutated monsters. We were on a ship to a strange land full of mutated monsters. It felt exciting, uncharted. My uncle had already seen me in this state as a boy, the desperate eagerness for excitement and adventure. I had missed his first bout of this eagerness by about 25 years, but here I saw it again, reawaken

I could not tell you when exactly we saw the land for the first time, all we saw were boats. boats over water, boats over water, boats over water. Then suddenly we looked down and under the boats furthest from us while still visible was sand. We had fully realised now that this was of international interest despite full warnings from their various governments, citizens of all countries were crowding here, I realised at least half of the boats an elbows distance from us, from which we could overhear chatter were manned by Frenchmen. We decided to back away from our intended destination of Castletown-Bearhaven and instead find somewhere less crowded along the coast. it’s not as if we would be fined, unfortunately, as before we were unoriginal in this thought and had to go a long way up the coast until we found somewhere uncrowded enough, I couldn't tell you exactly where it was a counterpart of because it was so unrecognisable.

Not of course that I'm saying that I am in the habit of recognising obscure Irish beach side, but rather it was unrecognisable as earth, certainly of Ireland, everything was covered in a layer of ash, light bounced off of rocks in an indescribably uncomfortable way.

We tried to use our location and satellite imagery to plot our location on the coastline, but it seemed that, while in large view the two British isles were symmetrical, there were small differences, the second British isles were almost torn and mangled as you zoomed in, the coast line we were on should have apparently been 2 kilometres inland. It didn't look like a crater, more like the coastline had been torn away like paper.

We had rented a Geiger counter from an entrepreneurial type, who bought them in bulk in England (the first one) and came to the second British isles to sell or rent them at criminal rates. He must have used one of those helicopters or planes to do that, no chance he could have done that in so little time with just a boat

The counter was not indicating anything out of the ordinary, which surprised us because the place positively looked like a nuclear wasteland, we suspected we may have been issued shoddy equipment. Overall though it all felt quite anticlimactic, it was just an ugly beach which smelt a bit. Not great for what had at this point been a 12 hour ordeal. We decided to go only a bit further inland, being aware that there had been reports of the locals stealing, looting, ransacking boats left unattended at the shore

We tried to stay within sight of the boat, or at least earshot. It now seems apparent as to why so few of the other boats had docked here, there was nothing interesting, not mutants, no swashbuckling. Now that even more news was established on the situation it seemed that 2nd Ireland was in fact the most boring of the British isle counterparts, also the most eroded.

In Scotland, Wales and England incredible anecdotes were flooding in. Deaths too, which were of course tragic, but you can't deny at the very least it was exciting. People were getting clubbed to death by monastic looking groups of tumour ridden worshipers accusing them of being sent by Satan. There were reports of people meeting doppelgängers which reminded me of sci-fi shows. Words which probably should have occurred to me earlier started appearing in my brain, parallel universe, dimensions, reality shifting, quantum something something. such exciting words, and yet only a black beach to show for it

We came back to the boat and readied for departure both thoroughly put off, we didn't have enough fuel to see much else and would have to go back. I thought I saw something in the corner of my eye but looked again and the scenery lay there still as ever, boring and tepid as ever. We knew from the wireless we would have to go far inland to find any life on Ireland let alone humans

We set off listening to the wireless and scrolling social media as we went. looking through a metre thick pane of glass at what was now a frenzy of excitement and wonder. Stories were flooding in of such strange and interesting stories. Though now it all became a lot less fictionalised in my mind, less of an adventure and more of a reality. I thought more and more of the tumour ridden monks. That kind of violence and paranoia only comes from desperation, not to mention the tumours of course which should be indicative in and of themselves that something isn't right.

I had not killed any of those people yet now in the twilight of the day I felt a sharp anger at myself for listening to the very real humanitarian situation here and thinking “Wow wow I want to see monsters”

We took a longer route than necessary home, presuming there would once again by an influx of boats sailing back

It seemed another boat had had the same idea, only one other, so it seemed our originality was slightly improving. It was a similar size to ours and went at a similar speed, catching up to us slightly only because of the slipstream. Getting closer we saw it looked in bad condition. Closer still we saw two men waving at us. A young man and an old man, they motioned for us to stop. We did and as they approached my uncle, and I almost simultaneously looked at one another. We had both noticed one thing. The name of the boat was “coordinate”. We both looked back at the crew, and they looked back at us, one I did not recognise but the other I had seen just that morning as I brushed my teeth

They stopped and tethered to us. The younger one reached his hand out to me, with dirty sunken nails. I shook it. remembering I’d seen fiction of time travellers/alternate dimensional versions of the same people coming into contact and exploding or some such. I knew that wouldn't happen and I didn't hesitate to shake his hand for such a pseudoscientific reason. But nonetheless as I touched him, I felt like I should expect something to happen. Something, anything, at the very least one of those funny electric shocks you get from static electricity. but it was just a hand.

He smiled, to my surprise his teeth seemed cleaner than mine. looking back, I imaging because he had not had as much access to sugar as I have

“hello” he said in an Irish accent

“hello” I said in received pronunciation, trying as hard as I could not to sound snobby

We both seemed taken aback by the other. Neither of us was what each other had expected

He was visibly shorter than me, at least by a few inches, but it was still unmistakably me

Next to me, to us, my uncle and the other man were hugging. I hadn't noticed this and had no idea how long they'd been doing it and what they had done preceding the hug. I felt guilty. as if I had committed ultimate narcissism by being so fascinated in myself I had not noticed two large men bearhugging metres away from me

The other man I later found out was my grandfather, or rather my other grandfather. By which I don't mean in the sense of the difference between one’s mothers’ father and one's fathers’ father. I mean the one from the other Britain not the dead one from my Britain. This is one of the little noticed annoying impacts of the whole ordeal. Referring to friends, family and acquaintances has become such a pain

The other me and I do well together, in the back of my mind I think I’ve always wanted a twin to some degree, I think most people do, though don't admit it to avoid accusations of narcissism

The second British isle is unliveable. Crops do not grow, rivers do not run, and various weaponry is everywhere. It’s not exactly clear what happened there, certainly something dystopian or apocalyptic, but accounts vary from the different natives, some say nuclear war, some bioweapons, some say the country was ransacked and striped for resources by a larger country, there are 3 different groups claiming this, one claims this attack come from America, another claims it comes from China, another claims Russia. It largely seems like it's a patchwork, an amalgamation of dystopias put together, this shows geologically too. Ireland and Northern Ireland seem to have survived a geothermal event. There is no trace of such an event in Wales, Scotland or England.

My twin and I seemingly led exactly the same life down to minute details up to 16 years ago. However, after that for him a solar flare destabilises large parts of our infrastructure and communication, this combined with the 2008 economic crash at the time drove people to religious extremism and seeing the solar flare as a message from God, several religiously inclined terrorist groups drew mass following and funding. And killed “heretics” by the millions, he fled by boat, our boat and docked at the island Grassholm with his grandfather, my grandfather. They followed one of the crowds of boats they could see, as there were no religious insignia which was unusual for him, he and his grandfather rowed at first, with the help of a slightly pathetic yet nonetheless helpful solar powered motor they had set up for fishing and means of escape if any of the post-flare churches were to discover them and try them for heresy or not paying their tithe. They were given fuel by some of the tourists from the first British Isles who sympathised with their story. The fuel they burnt once they recognised us at Castletown-Bearhaven, where they had gone to gawk at the gawkers. They kept their distance before trailing us tentatively and waving us down

Our home was defaced, with a slur for those from the second isles of Britain that I shan't repeat. My twin and I have been seen in public. along with the grandfather, whom many in the area know died years ago

more or less everyone has or had a counterpart in the 2ndBI, an exact replica of 70 million people or so. We are allowed to house ours in First isles as we discovered and brought them back before the legislation was passed banning their introduction to the old world (the old world to us, The new world to them) without due process. they are to stay on their british isles.

As “it is theirs and ours is ours” those opposing their integration say , along with “they did this to themselves”. I can't help but notice that they didn't.

It was strange seeing my grandfather again. I was young when he died so my mental image of him has warped and changed over the years, more of a concept than a face. The concept of kindness, or maybe the concept of wiseness.this paired with the fact that he had further aged a couple of decades since the last time I saw him, or rather, the other him. I had been hesitant to interact with him, his very presence raised the hairs on my neck.

There was an uncanniness to him. More so than the other me. the light came off him in the wrong way, almost the wrong chirality.

Eventually he was the one to engage me in an actual conversation. He joked that he was about to ask me a question thinking I was his grandson. I do not think he really thought this. We took precautions to distinguish ourselves from one another, which largely involved a lot of violently fluorescent clothing in contrasting and ridiculous colours. and which is too embarrassing for me to detail to you.

He asked what I remembered of the other him, I told him not much. him taking me to sea and being being at once wise and sarcastic

“that sounds exactly like me, wise, funny, non repetitive, charming, humble, original, non repetitive”

while I could not pinpoint the exact memory, him saying that gave me a strong sense of deja vu

over time the uncaniness wore off. He seemed more and more like the man from my memory. He and my uncle were inseparable. After someone you know dies quickly and unpredictably, you begin to ruminate and think back to every time you voluntarily gave up time spent with them. And hate your past self for taking what they had for granted

My uncle and other grandfather had now entered the rarefied club for those who could get a second chance. without having to sacrifice anything or anyone at all. My other grandfather does not talk about how my other uncle died, or how my other father died in his world. Though I gleamed that they were somewhat violent.

At around 08:00 on the 27th of April 2025 several large white vans containing large volumes of nitroglycerin crashed into the base of the horizon 22 building in london. Other explosives were set around the base of the building minutes before by unidentified pedestrians. Possibly as back ups, or possibly to make sure that as the building fell it would angle towards the gherkin (the skyscraper, not the pickled cucumber). It was later released by the news that the affair had been orchestrated by an offshoot of a religious movement prominent in the Lincolnshire of the other Britain.

That region appeared to have come from Britain in which the government had been overthrown by the monarchy in the 1970s. Which was in turn overthrown in the 1990s. The resulting instability and lack of authority paired with the poor state of education caused Britain to fall into disrepair. Over this time the UK uranium and plutonium reserves from the cold world war were being stolen and sold back off to other countries, these were often mishandled and on at least 2 occasions a runaway chain reaction occurred causing minor explosions across the country. These only had shortlasting consequences. In the long run what was far more damaging was the constant mishandling and misuse of radioactive material. Increasing cancer rates and congenital complications.

An alliance of former parish churches collected and formed the belief that the recent events were signs of the apocalypse. A charismatic leader developed among them, whose real name was still not known, but called himself Jesus, as in the Jesus. Over the 2010s these isolated parish communities became more and more extreme and began waging mini crusades against other communities in the area that were seen as heretical.

Once they were introduced as second Britain they're belief system had been disrupted. None of what they now saw was accounted for in their rituals or world view. They needed a coping mechanism. A scapegoat. The man who called himself Jesus started suddenly having visions of God dictating that the first Britain, our Britain, was an alternate, lesser world in which the wrath of God had not fully descended. And it was their duty to bring about righteous judgement.

Due to the fact that their history had deviated so long ago from our own, in the late 60s or early 70s, all of those who involved were middle aged at best

Over months they arranged to find their counterparts in first Britain, kill them, replace them and use their positions to target horizon 22.

After the attack and the national shock, retaliation efforts were made. First Britain almost immediately sent military forces to Second Britain in an attempt to focus on mounting extremism. Including the growth of the same religious group responsible for the horizon 22 attack

And that's it, I never finished this.

Letter to parents from jean moulin's forgotten brother

Maman, Papa, ne vous inquiétez pas pour moi (votre enfant préféré), car ma décision est prise : je vais m’en aller rejoindre la Résistance.

À propos de votre dernière lettre, non, je n’ai rien entendu de Jean. Et je ne sais pas quand il reviendra d’Angleterre. Mais vous pouvez toujours recevoir des nouvelles de moi. Par exemple, vous vous souvenez quand Jean avait plutôt souhaité la fin de sa vie que d’aider l’oppression des autorités ? Bien sûr que vous vous en souvenez, vous prenez toutes occasions possible pour me le rappeler.

Eh bien, qu’est-ce que vous penseriez si je vous disais que moi aussi je me suis engagé de toutes mes forces contre le régime intolérable de Pétain ? Juste l’autre semaine, mon supérieur m’a donner une ordre et je luis et dit : “Je préférerais me couper le cou plutôt qu’obéir à tes demandes sadiques!”

Je ne veux pas vous faire peur avec les événements qui ont suivi, mais en bref, il a demandé à quelqu’un d’autre de lui passer le sel.

Je sais que en temps mes menace de violence contre les individue dans cette organisation vont peut a peut completement détruire les nazi. On pourais peut etre dire que Jean a marcher pour que je puis voler. Ah ouis, je pense souvent au jour out tout la france va se souvenir de mois, Eustache Moulin!

Bureau des Concierges

St Augustin Maison de retraite

Fribourg

Suisse

Analysis of the planet mercury

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. it is a minimum of 77.3 million kilometres and a maximum distance of 221.9 million kilometers from earth. It is 330 yottagrams In mass and has a volume of 46.48 earth oceans and an equatorial radius of 2440.5 kilometres

Exosphere

Mercury possesses a thin exosphere made up of atoms blasted off the surface by the solar wind and striking meteoroids. It is mostly composed of oxygen, sodium, hydrogen, helium, and potassium.

Caloris Planitia

First discovered by the mariner 10 spacecraft in 1974 Caloris planitia is one or the largest basins in the solar system. It has a diameter of roughly 1540 kilometres and is ringed by mountains as high as 2 kilometers, as suggested by pictures taken by the MESSENGER mission on the 14th of January of 2008. Surrounding Caloris Planitia are some unexplained radial grooves which radiate around a seemingly unrelated crater that just so happens to be at the centre of the basin named Apollodrus. This phenomenon is named Pantheon Fossae, though is known informally as the spider, due to the trenches appearing to be many legs attached to a spherical body.

At the antipode of caloris planitia, lies a large patch of terrain, described by the planetary society as having “an unusual texture, hilly and lineated” it is believed this terrain may be a result of the shockwave brought about by the impact that produced the calories basing converging on the other side of the planet.

A similar effect is observed at the antipode of Imbrium Orientale on the moon.

Presence of Water

Water is believed to exist on mercury in the form of ice, despite its high surface temperatures. One of the chief suggestions of water has been radar bright deposits at the poles of the planet.

Inside A Mormon Church

I was once brushing up on some chemistry via a youtube video one day. An advert for the Church of Latter- day Saints came up, it featured a young woman guaranteeing a free book of Mormon for anyone willing to fill in a form and get visited by some missionaries. I was already desperate to have an out from learning some very boring chemistry so this didn’t seem such a bad idea. I filled in the form and had some missionaries come by my house the next day, both of them were kids, in their early twenties. They wore ties and badges emblazoned with “elder” and their last name. I’ll call them elder pot and elder kettle. In preparation for their arrival I dusted off my knowledge of Mormonism (what makes them different from other christian denominations, when did they split off and the like). Obviously I had a lot of questions. Most being variations of “who would believe this”.

The fundamentals of Mormonism are that they believe a teenager named Joseph smith had an angel named Moronai reveal the location of magic gold tablets. Then Joseph Smith had bestowed upon him the ability to translate these tabletes, from reformed Egyptian (which, by the way, is a language Joseph Smith made up) into English, using seer stones and other mystical techniques. Then Moronai came back and took the gold tablets back up to heaven.

I asked the missionaries how they believed this, why the fact that the only evidence that Joseph Smith was truly ordained by God was conveniently taken back to heaven, even though that would completely go against what they believe their god to want. To my surprise on this front they didn't even put up a fight. They just agreed, “yeah that is weird isn’t it, but god works in mysterious ways”

I moved on to their theodicy, how they justified evil in the presence of an all good god, they went with the free will route, I used my go to response to this and pointed out that it is all well and good to use that response for evil committed by believers, but everything else is still a problem.

There's no free will being tampered with if god stops children getting leukemia. Nor would there any free will being interfered with if god were to reveal himself to a heretic just before attacking another heretic, or someone of the “correct” religion

They fizzled off again here and I never really got an answer

Then I addressed the actual text itself, specifically the fact that the book of Mormon contains loads of anachronisms. It is meant to be a documentation of a group of israelites that had immigrated to america. But all sorts of details are off, crops are mentioned that simply did not exist in the Americas until about 3000 years after the events detailed in the book, the same for domesticated horses, cattle and so on and so forth. To this they answered that we just probably hadn’t unearthed these yet, because America has only been discovered quite recently.

I had them come back every Tuesday and 20:30. Elder kettle and elder pot quickly invited me to their church, and told me a professor at Oxford university would attend and he could answer my questions. I went to church the next Sunday and sat next to him. He was a very serious, weary looking man. Several speakers came up to a lectern, saying the kinds of things you'd expect in most churches, feel good stuff. The one that stood out to me was an extremely tired and dishevelled looking woman. Her speech was short, she talked about how no matter how hard life is, God is there, and everything will be ok. She spoke of the story of job and how his life was torn apart only to be rewarded with twice as much. She seemed to be saying it to herself more than anyone else in the church. The whole time she wearily looked out into the distance and took long pauses, looking as if on the brink of tears.

She finished and stepped away, as the next person came up to take the lectern they stopped to give her a comforting touch on the back, whispering some words of encouragement presumably. I assumed something had happened to her, or maybe her situation had been on the downhill for a while. Whatever it was, it was tragic to me that this was her coping mechanism. How much worse could it get for her if she truly believed the more she suffered the more she was going to be suffered? How much less would she struggle to help herself if she believed her god would do it for her?

Eventually the speechmaking ended and the mood turned to a seminar for missionary work, a form was handed out. The professor turned to me and told me that this part wasn’t really for me, so we could doddle off and have a conversation in another room. We found some chairs and I asked him why he chose Mormonism. He told me that he had grown up Mormon and had received a revelation. He also found that the writing of the book of Mormon was so complex and so elegant that an uneducated Utah farmboy could not possibly have just made it up.

When I asked him some of the questions I had already tried on Pot and Kettle, he revealed that he actually had a theology that was far and away from almost everyone else’s in that church. He revealed that he took very little of the bible literally, calling back to earlier when the distraught woman had spoken to the congregation about job. He explained that he did not believe the story of job ever happened. Nor did any other part of genesis. He knew that there was no archaeological evidence for the flood, or the fleeing of the Israelites. He believed that it was absolutely possible and probable that the words of Jesus had been tampered with in the new testament. After everything was stripped off he believed very little of traditional christian doctrine, fundamentally only that Jesus was a god. Every other sentence of his would start off “Well, look, this is what the church itself would tell you, but I believe…" I realised that he was as different from his fellow latter day saints as I was from him. It seemed he had cause to believe in the reliability of Joseph Smith but was incredibly disillusioned with the Church authority itself. A few weeks later I would find something out about him that would solidify this as a possibility. After a while time went by (it tends to do that) and I had another thing to frolic off to, so we said our goodbyes.

After Christmas I examined the moral attitudes of Pot and Kettle. I asked them about the role of women. They seemed tolerant enough about them but were very insistent that raising a family would be their one true calling, not that unusual for any christian denomination. I asked them what they thought of homosexuality. They explained that their position was that while the act of homosexual sex itself was a sex, the church recognised that some people were born hoosexual of no “fault” of their own. So one could be openly homosexual but either elect for abstinence and celibacy, or marry a woman regardless. If you were a practising homosexual, so to speak, your position in the church would be extremely limited. After a while they offered to have the professor join us by call. I asked more questions in the same vein, and got significantly higher quality answers from him. When I asked further questions on the attitudes towards homosexuality his demeanor changed and he revealed that his own brother was openly homosexual, with a husband, and so was effectively Ostracized both officially and socially by the church. Once again, in a very tired voice, he said “Well, look, this is what the church itself would tell you, but I believe…”. Over the next few weeks Elders Pot and Kettle revisited. It became clear that I was talking to the monkeys and not the organ grinder and the weekly ritual had gotten a little stale, their infuriating habit of eventually admitting that they had no evidence for their claims, but still telling me that they were right, because they felt it in their hearts. They shrugged at me and smiled and brushed off every inconsistency of their belief system like water off a duck’s back.

They asked me to pray to god to reveal to me if he was true, If the book or mormon was true which I did.

I went back to the church and listened to more speeches. After, someone told me that every two weeks, after the service, the men and women would separate into 2 groups and talk. I joined the men and sat in their makeshift circle. Two groups were new to the church. A convert from another christian denomination and his friends who had come to see his baptism, And the family of a long time converted mormon. We all introduced ourselves to the group and started. The subject matter was innocuous, the average age around that circle must have been in the 30s or 40s but they spoke to each other like children. They talked about mentors and who ours were, as well as who we were mentors to. They used as a case study the child of a mutual friend of the regulars, They asked who were his mentors. They listed his parents, his older siblings, his teachers and his church ministry. Eventually the metaphorical talking stick was handed to who I assume was the father of one of the converts. He started off by stating that he was not Mormon but so long as they were christian he thought they had enough in common, he was clearly uncomfortable though. He was from Nigeria. He explained that his experience of white people had always been with missionaries, so he assumed that all white countries contained only christians. A man a few seats away from me smiled, shook his head and chortled “I wish”. The Nigerian detailed his shock and disappointment upon coming here for the first time seeing how secular Britain really is. He then vented his frustration that British schools did not even forcibly teach bible stories, proudly boasting that the bible was mandatory reading in Nigeria. Everyone laughed and applauded his country, A young man sitting next to me spoke to the Nigerian directly, “if it makes you feel better there are some schools where they still learn the bible, private schools I think, I went to one”

This whole interaction made my hairs stand up on my neck. The casualness with which they described misleading vulnerable children into adopting beliefs they had no true justification for. Both in the instance they briefly mention the role of the ministry in the life of the child of their mutual friend, and in the wider remark about all schools.

Eventually Elder Pot and Elder Kettle told me they would be leaving soon, Elder Pot’s 2 year mission was nearly over and elder Kettle was going to continue his somewhere else. An event was being held at the church, an FHE, Family Home Evening. Normally, as the name suggests done amongst families, but also sometimes arranged for the metaphorical family of churchgoers. And this would be my last opportunity to see the pair.

Later in the evening, Elder Kettle asked me if I like anime, I told him I’d seen some of them and had not not un-disliked them. He pulled me to the side and pulled out of his pocket a pack of collection cards, similar to the pokemon ones. But the writing on this one was entirely in japanese and was absolutely covered with half undressed, physically impractically cup sized anime style women. He told me his friend in Taiwan loved to collect these cards and that they were very popular in the east. His friend had given him this pack and Kettle wondered if I would like it.