The Final Word – Watch your tongue

By Paul Moore

If one believed in such things, it would be very easy to believe we are living in the last days.

A few years ago there was a teaching fad which talked about the flipped classroom where the pupils became the teachers and the teachers the facilitators.

That worked well. It is as though the whole world is know in a state of flipped classroom where what was up is now down and what was down is now in outer space somewhere.

So, for example, speaking of space it seems scientists now believe they may have found evidence that there could be life in other planets.

Reading the evidence it seems there is water on other planets and this could suggest the possibility of some form of living entity.

Of course all the flat earth brigade are now screaming ‘I told you so!’ and are convinced that all the nonsense about flying saucers and see-through creatures with pointed heads was true all along and now that he who speaks the ‘truth’ is in the Whitehouse scientists can no longer hide it from us.

The Chinese, not to be outdone in the weirdness stakes, then announce that they have had robots competing in a half marathon race in Beijing. Some of them had feminine features, some wore trainers and some boxing gloves (?) and almost all finished the 21 kilometre course. Before you ask the obvious question – why? – it is worth noting that the Chinese already have robots working in coal mines so that humans do not have to go underground and it is robots which build most of the mobile phone chips we carry around in our pockets.

If the trade war really gets nasty I know which side I am backing to win and it is not Mr Truth.

But none of this craziness could prepare one for the ultimate proof that the world is indeed going to hell in the proverbial handbag. Just before the Easter festivities viewers to BBC television were greeted by the beaming face of the Reverend Kyle Paisley – yes indeed, son of – announcing to the world that there is ‘a deep intersection between Presbyterianism and the Irish language’.

Is this what we have been marching for over the last three hundred odd years; is this what the six counties were formed for; is this what we separated schools for and ensured that employment was the preserve of only one part of the community?

So that the Free Presbyterian Church, led by a Paisley family member, could recommend that we all start speaking the Gaelic.

The next thing we will be taking bodhrans, Irish pipes and tin whistles into the Sunday folk service and travelling around the world on Irish passports.

Do not, either, give me all this stuff about how Presbyterians were among those who kept the Irish language alive in the 18th and 19th centuries.

They were not ‘proper’ presbyterians, people who have never cooked a meal on a Sunday opting instead to prepare all on Saturday night and honour the sabbath. The only consolation I can find is that it seems the Reverend Paisley is not a proper presbyterian either.

He is a Free Presbyterian minister in England where he quotes Nelson Mandela who said that: ‘If you speak to a man in a language that he understands you’ll reach his head, but if you speak to him in his language you’ll reach his heart.’

Maybe there is then method in this madness after all and I did read that if you learn a second language it can ward off dementia so with that in mind, and in a spirit of good will and Easter peace to all, I have decided lot learn a second language – Japanese.