cake in milk

I attended a talk on the merits of the narrative non-fiction genre in Notting Hill the other month. I was a huge fan of Jon Ronson, but hadn’t really heard of either of the other speakers; Blake Morrison and Isabel Losada. Blake was really good and interesting and Isabel… well, it’s a little telling that on Amazon the majority of the books on her recommended reading list are her own.

The next day I conducted an interview with Jon for Den of Geek. We covered a range of subjects but during our last ten minutes briefly discussed a bit of the sceptical movement. It didn’t really tie in too closely with the media-related talk, so I’m publishing it here.

I’ve seen you a couple of at the Sceptics in the Pub meetings in Holborn and I know you attended TAM London the other weekend. How do you find those kinds of things?

I’ve thought a lot about this actually and the conclusion I came to is that the good stuff about them kind of outweighs the bad stuff. The main thing, as I tweeted about afterwards, is that sometimes you need to draw a line in the sand about what’s true and what’s not true. And not enough people do that and I think it’s really valuable. So there’s a bit of over-love of Randi but I just think they’re good spirits, and they’re factually right.

It amused me last night when Isabel brought up past lives and you slammed it as simply being wrong.

I was just a bit grumpy, but for fucks sake don’t we know by now that it’s bollocks? I was past-life regressed once and it’s so obviously a scam. You’d have to be an idiot to not think it’s a scam. What happens when you’re being regressed is you’re just desperate to please the regressor, so you just come up with fucking suits of armour and Joan of Arc and whatever shit you can come up with.

How do you define yourself then with regards to the sceptic side of things? Which category do you fall under?

Ooh…  I don’t really know. My main sort of problem is they can be aggressive and hostile towards believers. I was talking to Adam Curtis the other day and we were talking about the sceptics and he said the same things: there’s no life after death but it doesn’t matter because look at all the wonderful things in life. Adam’s point to me is “what about someone who’s just about to die?” and he’s got a point. There is some comfort you can take from religion and there’s no problem with that. So even though I know as well as I can know that the sceptics are right about everything the fact that they’re not particularly humane is the thing that stops me from being a 100% supporter. An atheist is a weird thing to call yourself, I think. My initial gut feeling about that is why do you want to advertise yourself in that way? I see myself as a writer.

One of my hobbies is to collect writers’ first published works which have never been reprinted. This is generally because either they’re not very good, or the publishers have folded. Jon looked horrified when I presented him with a copy of Clubbed Class and threatened to firebomb the shop that sold it to me.

Technorati Tags: den of geek, joan of arc, jon ronson, sceptics in the pub, TAM, the men who stare at goats

I met up with the kind and exuberant comedian Josie Long for an interview just before she went off to plunder charity shops for her London is Funny column. She suggested a pub in Holborn for the venue which turned out to be a BNP hangout with a distinct smell of dead rat. Next time I’ll choose.

The interview is up at Den of Geek, but here’s an extra added special bonus piece of conversation around my question about her atheism. I brought up the only other thing of note in Holborn: the Sceptics in the Pub meetings.

Josie: How are they? Are they great?

Me: It’s quite good; I’ve seen Robin Ince there, Jon Ronson, Ben Goldacre… It sometimes creates a church-like atmosphere in itself.

Josie: Yeah, ‘cos people are so… but you know what? It’s a way that people bond and that bonding is for good.

Me: You can tell that the bonding there is the only bonding some of the attendees get.

Josie: Aww, yeah, lonely dorks. People need ways to look after one another a bit and be kind to one another and anything that does that can be good. More and more I find I have to organise community events. Where I live there’s a resident’s group and they have meetings and it’s so lovely and I wish there was more things like that in cities ‘cos in villages you have your village mayor, and when you have kids you have your school fête so it’s more for people who don’t fit into established community categories; something to bring them together.

And here’s a bonus piece of poor quality audio, straight from the dictaphone, of me asking a question which a friend suggested.

[podcast]http://www.cakeinmilk.com/podcasts/Josie%20Long.mp3[/podcast]

Technorati Tags: atheism, den of geek, holborn, josie long, sceptics in the pub