Decided to escape London today and go for a drive and ultimately visit my parents who were disappointed to see that I hadn't mentioned that it was their 44th wedding anniversary yesterday.
I am going to struggle to match that achievement now. I fear I've left it too late.
I popped by Glastonbury first, partly because I am half thinking about writing a book that is set there and partly because the abbey is quite a cool place to visit.
Of course the whole place is full of what might pleasantly be described as the eccentric. Or might otherwise unpleasantly be described as the kind of people who would blame a stranger for not knowing what coinage was accepted in a phone box.
As I walked around the abbey grounds two women were approaching me. One was young and looked fairly normal (though with a slight goth influence), the other was older and had suspiciously jet black hair that was juxtaposed against flowing white robes.
I prejudged her as some kind of insane hippy who probably believed in witchcraft and ley lines and was almost certainly part of a religion that believed that the planet earth was alive and female or some such.
For once my preconceptions were confirmed, because as they passed I heard just one sentence from the woman in white and this is what it was, "After Atlantis was destroyed in 11,000 BC all the religious texts were re-written- the Bible included."
You couldn't have made up a more embarrassing and stereotypical sentence if you were writing a poor TV drama that called for a hippy-dippy mumbo-jumbo talking idiot character.
I half wished I could have followed the women to find out more about this theory and more importantly to discover how this woman was privy to this generaly unacknowledged information, but instead I watched them walk off into the distance, with the faint sound of the Atlantis expert's jangling jewelery blowing in the wind.
I am not sure how much of the Bible was written in 11,000 BC. Not much I would guess as Archbishop Ussher worked out from the Bible (and his own self-proving calculations) that creation had occurred sometime around October 24th 5244 BC (that's not the exact date, but I'm sure you can look it up using the internet if you're interested).
I just loved the certainty in the woman's voice.
It was of course someone else's certainty in his beliefs (and greedy self interest admittedly) that had caused the abbey at Glastonbury to be smashed to pieces and left in the dreadful state of repair that it's currently in, even though he essentially believed in exactly the same god as the monks who lived there.
Much as I disagree with the berobed lady I am glad she gets the chance to express her wrong views and promise never to attempt to destroy her house (or the crystals and fairy statues that she clearly has inside it). Live and let live I say.
I wonder if she's got some pre 11,000 BC copies of the Bible and the Koran that she can show us though. I'd be interested to see how they differ from the false versions that the modern world foolishly embraces.
Well, at least we're agreed on that.
