But you can’t be larfin your head off all the time  so  I revised my opinion of Ken Champion’s fine polemic on Education which will run for a few more issues. I feared a Marxism Today effect – this CPGB organ (1957-1991) edited by Martin Jacques was a powerful soporific – I wondered if Zhdanov has anything to do with it. Now back numbers go for a tenner each on Ebay.
 

Philosophy is a recurring theme in the Oik. This issue contains the usual back and to between John Lee and Ron Horsefield but this time on work – about which  neither seems to know much. Ron discovers the great Oik writer Peter Currell Brown (who now makes pots). He tells me that John is currently wrestling with Wittgenstein and is particularly disturbed by LW’s remark “All my propositions are nonsense” But surely, I rejoined, we could invoke the Cretan liar objection and ask if this proposition itself was also nonsense. John, of course, is far ahead of meathead Ron in these matters and often recalls his exchange with the great Gilbert Ryle when he visited Hull. It ran as follows:
 

John Lee: What would you like to drink Professor Ryle? Gilbert Ryle: I’ll have half of mild please John

It’s probably in some early edition of Mind but if not then scholars should refer to Crazy Oik 61.

CONFESSION

Tom Kelly 

I spent a lot of the time looking into the coal fire, thinking of the flames of Hell, that’s the sort of thing a Catholic boy does. You imagine burning forever. I would say to myself, “It must be right; otherwise, why would the priest tell ye. It has to be true.” Mam, dad and my sister are here somewhere. I am watching flames lick up the chimney into the blackness that is Hell. Was I afraid? Terrified? Take your pick. Make a choice. Throw a dart. Win a coconut. Hope is in the air. The future is big. Over there behind the ‘Duke of Wellington’ pub, is the coaly Tyne, the shipyards, with boats on their way to everywhere in the world. We lived in Hope Street. And as the song says, “We had high hopes!” And the power of prayer, “Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be thy name…”

I feel God’s grace and see Christ bleeding on his cross walking to Mass. We walk down Salem Street to St Bede’s Church where God’s in a box, held in a golden cage, with a light shining forever; that’s how I saw and felt it. The Holy Ghost found me but I didn’t say. I kept it to myself. He came through the window, hovered round the floating white net, drifting above my bed and threw burning coals which see-sawed round the room. It was not a dream. The coals were blood red with streaks of gold, like bloodlines in rocks. God was placing blood into me, “God made me to know him and love and serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.” The ‘next,’ the other life was real. I stood at my window looking at the street. A gas lamp was outside our window, its flame whispering.

A foreign seaman walked up the street, then knocked on a door. There was a prostitute in our street; not a proper one you see with fur coats and no knickers outside the dock, she was an enthusiastic amateur. “Did it for cigarettes and stockings”, I heard dad say. A new man every week with different tattoos, one of them gave me a bar of chocolate, the biggest I had ever seen.

I spun nights away around the blue-green lamppost and played  football,  with  dad  on  the  field:  it  was  a  religious exprience. Night cut in and all you could see were our