GKC Christmas Party? Wine & Pork Pies Surely!

I was very excited on seeing the headline "GKC Christmas Party."

Being a huge GK Chesterton (aka GKC) fan - though not as huge as the great man himself, whose cause for canonisation is well under way - I envisaged a wonderfully warm, witty gathering of great minds and friendly faces, quaffing wine (very continental and dare I say Catholic) and pork pies (quintessentially English and against all the dietary fads that GKC would have poked fun at).

How disappointed was I to find out that the GKC Christmas Party was in fact being held by the Greenville Kennel Club - the clue being in the name.

Oh well.

My tweeds, extra padding and GKC wig will have to go back to the hire shop.

Still it could have been worse - I could have booked the ticket to America, or even to Australia for the GKC Christmas meet. I was excited to read that they would be having fish n chips.... though what/who is "Barwon Heads Pup" and how you would eat it has left me perplexed. Sounds positively Korean.

All of which GKC, the king of the paradox, would have found highly amusing.

Here he is at his best with The Problem With Modern Man:

‘But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.' (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1909).

"Rebel" students take note...