inner north london top floor flat all white walls white carpet white cat rice paper partitions modern art and ambition the host s a physician bright bloke has his own practice his girlfriend s an actress an old mate of ours from home and they re always great fun so to dinner we ve come the fifth guest is an unknown the hosts have just thrown us together for a favour cause this girl s just arrived from australia and has moved to north london and she s the sister of someone or has some connection as we make introductions i m struck by her beauty she s irrefutably fair with dark eyes and dark hair but as she sits i admit i m a little bit wary because i notice the tip of the wing of a fairy tattooed on that popular area just above the derrire and when she says i m sagittarian i confess a pigeonhole starts to form and is immediately filled with pigeon when she says her name is storm conversation is initially bright and lighthearted but it s not long before storm gets started you can t know anything knowledge is merely opinion she opines over her cabernet sauvignon vis vis some unhippily empirical comment made by me  not a good start i think we re only on pre dinner drinks and across the room my wife widens her eyes silently begs me be nice a matrimonial warning not worth ignoring so i resist the urge to ask storm whether knowledge is so loose weave of a morning when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door or the window on her second floor the food is delicious and storm whilst avoiding all meat happily sits and eats while the good doctor slightly pissedly holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history when storm suddenly insists but the human body is a mystery science just falls in a hole when it tries to explain the nature of the soul my hostess throws me a glance she like my wife knows there s a chance that i ll be off on one of my rare but fun rants but i shan t my lips are sealed i just want to enjoy the meal and although storm is starting to get my goat i have no intention of rocking the boat although it s becoming a bit of a wrestle because like her meteorological namesake storm has no such concerns for our vessel pharmaceutical companies are the enemy they promote drug dependency at the cost of the natural remedies that are all our bodies need they are immoral and driven by greed why take drugs when herbs can solve it why use chemicals when homeopathic solvents can resolve it i think it s time we all return to live with natural medical alternatives and try as i like a small crack appears in my diplomacy dyke by definition i begin alternative medicine i continue has either not been proved to work or been proved not to work do you know what they call alternative medicine that s been proved to work medicine so you don t believe in any natural remedies on the contrary storm actually before i came to tea i took a remedy derived from the bark of a willow tree a painkiller that s virtually side effect free it s got a weird name darling what was it again maspirin baspirin oh yes aspirin which i paid about a buck for down at the local drugstore the debate briefly abates as my hosts collect plates but when they return with desserts storm pertly asserts shakespeare said it first there are more things in heaven and earth than exist in your philosophy science is just how we re trained to look at reality it doesn t explain love or spirituality how does science explain psychics auras the afterlife the power of prayer i m becoming aware that i m staring i m like a rabbit suddenly trapped in the blinding headlights of vacuous crap maybe it s the hamlet she just misquothed or the fifth glass of wine i just quaffed but my diplomacy dyke groans and the arsehole held back by its stones can be held back no more look storm sorry i don t mean to bore ya but there s no such thing as an aura reading auras is like reading minds or tea leaves or star signs or meridian lines these people aren t plying a skill they re either lying or mentally ill same goes for people who claim they can hear god s demands or spiritual healers who think they ve got magic hands by the way why do we think it s okay for people to pretend they can talk to the dead isn t that totally fucked in the head lying to some crying woman whose child has died and telling her you re in touch with the other side i think that s fundamentally sick do we need to clarify here that there s no such thing as a psychic what are we fucking two do we actually think that horton heard a who do we still believe that santa brings us gifts that michael jackson didn t have facelifts are we still so stunned by circus tricks that we think that the dead would wanna talk to pricks like john edward storm to her credit despite my derision keeps firing off clichs with startling precision like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition you re so sure of your position but you re just closed minded i think you ll find that your faith in science and tests is just as blind as the faith of any fundamentalist wow that s a good point let me think for a bit oh wait my mistake that s absolute bullshit science adjusts its views based on what s observed faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved if you show me that say homeopathy works then i will change my mind i will spin on a fucking dime i ll be as embarrassed as hell yet i will run through the streets yelling it s a miracle take physics and bin it water has memory and whilst its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice seems infinite it somehow forgets all the poo it s had in it you show me that it works and how it works and when i ve recovered from the shock i will take a compass and carve fancy that on the side of my cock everyone is just staring now but i m pretty pissed and i ve dug this far down so i figure in for a penny in for a pound life is full of mysteries yeah but there are answers out there and they won t be found by people sitting around looking serious and saying isn t life mysterious let s sit here and hope let s call up the fucking pope let s go watch oprah interview deepak chopra if you wanna watch telly you should watch scooby doo that show was so cool because every time there was a church with a ghoul or a ghost in a school they looked beneath the mask and what was inside the fucking janitor or the dude who ran the waterslide because throughout history every mystery ever solved has turned out to be not magic does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you does the idea that one afternoon on wiki fucking pedia might enlighten you frighten you does the notion that there may not be a supernatural so blow your hippy noodle that you would rather just stand in the fog of your inability to google isn t this enough just this world just this beautiful complex wonderfully unfathomable natural world how does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap man made myths and monsters if you re so into your shakespeare lend me your ear to gild refined gold to paint the lily to throw perfume on the violet is just fucking silly or something like that or what about satchmo i see trees of green red roses too and fine if you wish to glorify krishna and vishnu in a post colonial condescending bottled up and labeled kind of way then whatever that s okay but here s what gives me a hard on i am a tiny insignificant ignorant bit of carbon i have one life and it is short and unimportant but thanks to recent scientific advances i get to live twice as long as my great great great great uncleses and auntses twice as long to live this life of mine twice as long to love this wife of mine twice as many years of friends and wine of sharing curries and getting shitty at good looking hippies with fairies on their spines and butterflies on their titties and if perchance i have offended think but this and all is mended we d as well be 10 minutes back in time for all the chance you ll change your 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