My wife and I were at the solicitors this morning. Two and a half months of marriage is a long time. We gave it a good go, but now it was time for legal advice. Not to get divorced you nitwits, but to sort out financial stuff regarding the house and mortgage.
I then had to go to another solicitors to swear that I was not insolvent or bankrupt. I was told it involved signing a piece of paper in the presence of a solicitor and then giving him five pounds in cash (which seemed a surprisingly small amount of money, even for just two minutes of a solicitor's time). It felt a bit like going to a prostitute - I imagine. Though at least prostitutes have some honour.
A man came down and took me into a small office where the swearing would take place. I thought he'd just witness me signing the piece of paper and that would be that, but he said, "Are you happy to swear on the Bible?"
I think I probably laughed, assuming this was some kind of joke. This isn't the 16th Century. Surely nobody would want that now, or expect that doing so would force anyone to tell the truth. But he was serious. I was going to say, "Well actually I'm an atheist so there's not much point," but I was in a rush, this was a very minor little exercise and it wasn't making a fuss, but mainly I thought that it would be quite cool and amusing to make an oath on the Bible. Like I was in a film or charged with murder or something. I thought it was so pathetic that this was even a part of this process that I could at least satirise its meaninglessness by going along with it. I was also interested in seeing if the Bible started smoking and burning up when I put my hand on it.
But by making this snap decision not to say, "No actually I am not prepared to do that" (I am sure that there would have been a non-religious alternative) I did find myself in the weird position of holding a tatty Bible and repeating a religious based oath. It felt anachronistic and also vaguely wrong that superstition was being welded to a world of finance. And though I was telling the truth in the document I wondered if by making a promise based on something I didn't believe in actually negated the validity of the oath. I was telling the truth whilst living a lie. Should the law and religion have any connection? Surely God has His own laws and some of them differ from UK laws, so how does He feel when people swear on His book when they are actually contravening one of the laws inside it? It's a mine field.
I felt very odd as I walked away, like I had been soul raped by a man who had then charged me £5 for the privilege. I thought it would be amusing to play with the occult, but like those kids who mess around with ouija boards I had been left worrying that I had let the dark forces that exist around that magic book into my heart. Don't play around with these invisible forces. If my house falls down you will know why.
But seriously. Swearing on the Bible? What the fuck?
The second episode of Just a Minute that I recorded last month is now
up on iPlayer.
The Stewart Lee RHLSTP has been delayed by producer Ben working and then watching football and then Orange Mark having a power cut. I am not saying that that's anything to do with me swearing on a Bible, but it's weird. More likely the more powerful force of Stewart Lee has used his Luddite powers to try and hold back technology, but the podcast should be up on Wednesday.
