I'd Like to Tell You The Good News

“Thank you for sharing the gospel with me.

I want to share something with you. I know you will find it almost impossible to believe me, but I will share it anyway.

I know the God you are talking about. I understand the relationship you have with him. I understand the Holy Spirit that indwells you. I understand the Jesus you know. I understand your prayer life, how your soul is uplifted in worship, and how in God you find solace, redemption and grace. I understand the ways in which you see God at work, in the miraculous and the mundane, in scripture and the spiritual realm. I get it. I really do.

I am not behind you in this journey, fumbling to keep up, catching only glimpses of light ahead. I’ve come through the half-light where you are, and gone beyond, into the sunshine. Like you I was once convinced that we can now see only dimly, as through a mirror. But I am here to tell you good news of great joy: the dim mirror is a damn lie. The real world is bright and vivid, full of colour and texture, if you can set down the clouded mirror and turn to see it.

You are trapped in the world of a story. By focussing everything on that story, you’ve made the mythology into your reality. You have constructed an idol to worship: a base idol, made of words and doctrines rather than stone and metal. And, like Demetrius, you are consumed with its defence.

You hear the story, but do not understand what it signifies. Every conclusion you draw, every experience you have, is expressed in terms of the story, you mentally can’t go beyond it.

I know this because I too have been there. But I woke from this spirit of stupor, and so can you.

Let me suggest you read the bible again, more carefully this time, and in some detail. Given the season we’re fast approaching, read the two birth narratives of Jesus side by side, and try to understand what is going on.

It is hard, I know – your mind will keep being drawn to the surface things. You will be tempted to think always in terms of the world that is portrayed, to think about what it tells you about the character of God. I fear that you may just glide over things of significance, because you have been trained to do so. You’ve been taught to listen for the voice of God. That is hindering you, because that is still part of the narrative. It brings your mind always to the surface, with the illusion that you’ve been somewhere deeper.

But it is worth the attempt. Please try it. Take it slowly. Try to hear the real voices behind the story. Try to understand what they are saying and why. Listen to their tone. Use your intuition. Hear the echoes of the words that were not written; and feel the narrative rise under your gaze until you can see its naked form, and finally comprehend it.

You might not be able to do it. Not everyone can. Many who come from deep indoctrination just cannot. All they see is the superficial layer. They can never see the why, the how, the where. But maybe you can. I hope so.

I fear, though, that you won’t even try. That you’ll merely dismiss everything I say. Or decide that I’m simply lying, or ignorant of the true nature of your faith, or deluded, or stupid, or a tool of Satan seeking to attack you. If you can never even wander from that fortress of certainty, then I’m afraid you are truly entombed within its walls. You are condemned to live your whole life in twilight, convinced it is noon.

I can only hope that you can find any spark in you to try. Really to try. Not to dismiss, or to try with a condescending amusement. But to really try.

Even the effort may not be enough. There is no guarantee of success. I’ve seen some who’ve tried and failed, though most shun even the trying. But if you do, and do succeed, it will truly be the best thing you ever do.”

—

– edited from my response to an evangelistic commenter on this thread. Those of us who have seen the light should encourage those still lost in the darkness, right?

In Which Andy Makes A Video

Okay, yes three posts in a day means I’m a little bored by what I’m supposed to be doing. But hey.

Andy, some time commenter here, and Unitarian minister, has made a video:

Now you can see what he looks like! I had the pleasure of meeting up with him in London a month or so ago. He is as amusing and warm as in the video.

Hello Tehran

Dear Iranian Blog Reader,

Welcome. Thanks for stopping by. You were the first person from Iran to come here. I realise it wasn’t what you were looking for. I’m sorry you only stopped on the first page for less than a second, then left, and haven’t come back. I’m sorry I wasn’t more interesting. But thank you anyway.

Yours,

Ian.

The Popular Bits

Click this thumbnail to see a heat-map of the the popularity of different verses. You may have to click again once it appears to zoom in.

What are the most popular bits of the bible, to quote and discuss?. Often trolling around the religious blogs it is clear that lots of folks don’t have a wide vocabulary to choose from. So tonight I did an experiment.

Using some code I have, I queried Google to ask how many unique pages it has in its index referring to each verse of the New Testament. I won’t go too much into methodology here, its kind of like looking at the number of results when you do a regular google query, but there’s a lot of faffing about needed to exclude duplicate content, and to account for aliases in the names (1Co, 1 Cor, 1 Corinthians, etc) tendencies such as the fact that verses at the start of popular ranges get mentioned more (e.g. 1 Cor 12:1-10, should either be credited to all ten verses, or none, not to 1 Cor 12:1, which a normal search would do).

The searching process involved 8000 separate searches, and the collation of a fair amount of data on about 15m pages. The top ten passages are:

John 3:16	For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 14:6	Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
John 1:1	In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Matthew 28:19	Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Matthew 7:16	By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles?
Acts 1:8	But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Colossians 4:3	Pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains.
Acts 2:38	Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
John 10:10	The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
Mark 16:15	He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”

(Quotations from NIV)

Some of these were a *big* suprise to me. Colossians 4:3, really? Wow. And there’s an interesting pattern among the top 50 – many are missional like this. You can also see in this the problem of dividing by verses. Some quotes, like John 10:10 are rarely quoted in full, only the second half is normally used.

If you deal with frequencies at all, you know that distributions tend to be massively skewed: the winners win big, everyone else is way behind. Sure enough this distribution is a power law, with John 3:16 scoring more highly than the next 6 verses combined. And there are a lot of passages with only a handful of mentions.

A frequency graph showing how often each verse in the NT is discussed. The verses are ordered by decreasing frequency. The y scale is an adjusted number of pages - it won't be the value you get if you try this, because you won't share my underlying mathematical model.

Here is a graph of the frequency distribution of results. You can see that the first few are huge, and everyone else is basically nowhere. Obviously a very tiny proportion of the NT gets talked about.

A better diagram is the heat map above. This shows the relative distribution of popular bits. Note that the colors are generated by rank (not by absolute score), because if we did a heat map by score the whole thing would be purple with one or two blues, and then John 3:16 in red.

You can see some interesting trends on there (click for a bigger view, really it is worth it! – you may have to click again once it appears though, because it is taller than your screen, some browsers shrink it to fit). In particular you can see that John is the rockstar gospel, although Matthew’s sermon on the mount does pretty well. Among the letters Colossians is the clear winner, although Galatians is also pretty hot. I was surprised at 1 John, being so important, and 1 Corithians being so sparse. And Christians obviously don’t like encouragement, because Paul’s least scathing letter, 1 Thessalonians is practically entirely purple. And interesting that the top passage in Mark (16:15) isn’t really part of Mark at all.

There’s only so many conclusions you can draw around this, it is meant for fun rather than serious study. But if there are specific questions you’d like me to answer with the data, leave a comment.

The Hierarchy of Moral Principles

A couple of conversations in the last week have made me think about morality tonight.

In particular, I’ve been thinking about moral principles that I try to live by. For example “do no violence”, “be truthful”, “be compassionate”, “stand against injustice”. And I’ve been thinking about how these interact. Because they do. As I imagine gradually more extreme situations, any moral principle I might hold turns out to be a flexible guideline. And I realise that in very non-extreme situations I hold some other moral principles that I didn’t expect.

The interaction of moral principles seems to be hierarchical. There are definitely higher principles and lower principles.

For example, I am (in American political terms) pro-choice. But I also hold a moral position “don’t abort pregnancies”. That is a rather complex position: one where the severity of the moral prohibition changes based on the development of the foetus, and the situation of the mother. I think it a pretty obvious moral wrong to abort a foetus the day before it comes to term, for example. But I think while it would have been preferable to have a different outcome, it is no more immoral to abort an early stage foetus than it would be to impose the anguish of a pregnancy and childbirth on the undesiring mother. And even in the extreme case I can think of situations in which the abortion would be the morally preferable choice to worse evils.

This much is probably nothing new or insightful. But my attempt tonight to actually make explicit some of these connections has been interesting, and not entirely intuitive.

I believe in truth and honesty, for example, but if I’m honest, I compromise my integrity fairly often for social reasons. It may be not saying something that someone should know. Or else feigning more support for a position or person than I feel. Or emphasizing something that I know will lead someone to jump to the wrong (and a better) conclusion about me.

I guess we all do that. But the surprising thing to me is that, if I really think about them, many of those cases don’t feel morally wrong (sure, some do – mostly the ones that are designed to inflate my ego – they are morally wrong, but many aren’t). So I obviously have some kind of moral principle around “be social” or “be a good friend” that trumps my “be honest” sense. And I wouldn’t have thought that would be true about me. I would never have thought that my “be honest” would be an absolute (do you lie about the Jews in your attic to the Nazi officer? Hell yes!), but maybe not that negotiable.

And I’m not sure what is at the top. Maybe “protect your family”. I don’t know. The higher I climb the more far-fetched the imaged scenarios (“okay, I would kill the guy trying to kill my son, but would I kill the guy trying to kill my son if it meant dropping a bomb on a city and killing a hundred innocent bystanders…hmmm”), and the less I am at all confident that any intuitive response at that point is dependable.

If you think honestly about moral decisions you’ve made in the past, do you find that things you would have thought immoral actually don’t feel so?

—

A side note to bring things back to religion. As I’m thinking of these terrible scenarios, I can run to the most extreme: something like “is it moral to do X rather than see a thousand innocent people tortured to death over some extended period”. And I’m reminded why any Christianity which preaches a literal Hell can have no claims to its own morality nor to a moral God.

Paul on Jesus

One of the most interesting features of the NT is that Paul, the earliest Christian source we have, seems to know almost nothing about Jesus the man. He is completely obsessed by his death and resurrection, of course, and regularly talks about how Jesus has appeared to him. But we get no details about his life. This is particularly interesting given the way that non-evangelical Christians often stress the teachings and the actions of Jesus as being the foundation of their faith.

The central roundel from the mosaic of St Paul in the archepiscopal oratory of St. Andrew in Ravenna, Italy.

So here’s the low down. Paul seems to know a few basic facts about Jesus, such as that he was Jewish, and he wasn’t rich. He also seems to know about the 12 disciples, and the fact that Jesus has brothers (all of which he reveals because he was struggling against their authority, and trying to claim his own). The author of Acts has Paul quote Jesus once: “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35), but if this quote is of Jesus (let alone if the author is correct in giving it to Paul), then it isn’t recorded elsewhere – it isn’t in the gospels. Another similar quote appears in 2 Cor 12:8-9 where Paul quotes something that we don’t have another record of Jesus saying: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” – in this case a phrase which sounds unlike the Jesus presented in the gospels.

Then there are two teachings of Jesus that Paul seems to be aware of: Jesus’s prohibition on divorce, which appears in Mark 10:2-10 (and its parallels in Matt 19:3-12 and in abbreviated form in Luke 16:18). Paul seems to reference this in 1 Cor 7:10-11 where he says “I give this command (not I, but the Lord)…”. But even then he goes on to contradict Jesus, by saying that if an unbeliever leaves a believer, the believer isn’t bound to them any longer.

The second teaching is more vague. Paul suggests that it is okay for someone to be paid for their ministry. For example, in 1 Cor 9:14 (“The Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from it.”). Which may or may not reflect Jesus’s teaching in Luke 10:7 “The worker deserves his wages” (talking about the disciples’ evangelical efforts) and its possible parallel in Matt 10:10.

Which leaves us with only one unambiguous reference to the life and teachings of Jesus: the reference in 1 Cor 11:23-25 to the last supper. This is directly parallel to Matt 26:26-29, Mark 24:22-25 and Luke 22:19-20. In fact it is more parallel than that. It is almost word for word with the version in Luke. Which suggests that Paul (despite his insiting that the teaching came directly from Jesus, not through other people) might be finding that information in a literary source. Whatever the merits of that hypothesis, it doesn’t affect the general point – it is the only clear reference to something Jesus did or said during his ministry.

So, in summary

1 Cor 11:23-25 — The bread and wine, the only obvious parallel.

1 Cor 9:14 — Evangelists should receive material support for their work. A loose correspondence.

1 Cor 7:10-11 — Paul may be referring to Jesus’s teaching on divorce, but goes on to disagree.

2 Cor 12:8-9 — Paul quotes Jesus, but it doesn’t sound like Jesus, and the quote isn’t elsewhere.

Acs 20:35 — Luke quotes Paul quoting Jesus, but again we don’t have the quote elsewhere.

Gal 2:9 — Paul knows about the disciples Peter, John and James, and that (Gal 1:19) James was Jesus’s brother.

Gal 4:4 — Paul knows that Jesus is born of a woman under the law (i.e. was a Jew).

1 Cor 15:5 — Paul knows the ‘twelve’, but he doesn’t make it explicit if he associates them with Jesus’s disciples.

This lack of discussion in Paul has been often remarked upon. It just genuinely seems that Paul wasn’t interested in Jesus’s life or teaching, his miracles or his admonitions. Rather Paul focusses entirely on the Jesus he claims to know – the risen Christ. Some scholars have insisted that this isn’t a problem, for example Dunn says “Nevertheless, in letters not intended to provide biographical details, the number of allusions is probably enough to confirm both Paul’s knowledge of and interest in Jesus prior to his death and resurrection.” Jesus Remembered. Eerdmans, 2003. p 143. Which just seems ostrich-like denial to me.

The incarnation was a unique event in history where God spent time living among and teaching his creation, but Paul is content to never draw on that teaching or life? I say that’s odd.

So how do we resolve this? Well some have suggested this is evidence that Paul invented Jesus and he was a mythical figure who never really existed. But this doesn’t account for the fact that one of the few things Paul does say is that Jesus had brothers, of whom he names James and claims to have interacted with him. So that doesn’t wash for me.

I think it is most likely that Paul piggybacks onto the nascent Jesus movement. He takes some of the teachings that are circulating (such as the teaching about Jesus having been resurrected after his death, and the passover meal before it), and after a significant spiritual event (the Damascus road incident, but be aware that we only get that information from Acts, Paul is far far more conservative about what happened), he effectively deposits onto that movement his own spiritual innovation. He isn’t interested in Jesus’s teachings because he is only interested in himself and his own spiritual understanding and quest. It isn’t just Jesus, Paul never talks about anyone else’s teachings as significant, mentioning other teachers only when they explicitly teach the same thing as him, or when he’s in opposition to them.

This is my surmise, my hypothesis. I don’t claim we can evidence this in detail, but it seems to fit both what we know of Paul’s writings and what we know of the chronology of the first century spread in Christianity. If this is the case then it is true, as has been often remarked, that the world’s largest religion owes more to Paul than Jesus.

Is this spam effective?

I got a spam comment today that said just:

To all the above commentors. Blogs can be much better to read if You can keep Your comments simple and to the point. No-one likes to read giant comments when the concept can be conveyed using a not as long comment.

With the obligatory links back to some deal or other. Is that supposed to be successful? Even if it got past the spam bot, how would any blogger not kill it?

I understand that you try to hit the 0.1% of unprotected blogs. But honestly.

The Camel and the Eye of the Needle — Mark 10:23-27

And having looked around, Jesus said to the disciples “How difficult for those with riches to enter the Kingdom of God.” The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus again said “How difficult it is to enter the Kingdom of God. It is easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of of God.”

They were even more amazed, asking each other “Then who has the ability to save themselves?” Having watched this, Jesus said “Men lack the ability, but not God. For God has the ability to do all things.”

– tr. mine.

Photo: http://www.micreon.de/ A carving made by a femtosecond laser to promote the micro-component manufacturer Micreon. Also check out their website for a pair of glasses made for a fly.

One of the most inconvenient passages in the NT for Western Christians. The average US household income puts the average US householder in the top 10% of the richest people worldwide. Here in the UK we’re not far behind. If you are reading this on your own computer, in your own home, you’re one of the richest people in the world.

This passage follows the story of the rich young man, who comes to Jesus to ask what he might do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him to keep the law: the young man says he has; Jesus then tells him to sell everything he has and give it to the poor, then come and join him. The man goes away saddened, because he has many possessions.

There have been lots of attempts over the years to tone down this passage. Like most inconvenient passages in the bible it has been either ignored or neutered. In this case there are a bunch of approaches one can take to neutering it. Please suggest others.

1. The eye of the needle was a gate in Jerusalem. Camels that tried to enter that gate would have to have crawl through on their knees. Therefore it isn’t impossible for a rich person to enter the Kingdom, they just have to do so on their knees — This is a later invention with no historic or archaeological evidence. And makes no sense.

2. The ‘camel’ was a particular type of fisherman’s knot. Therefore it isn’t impossible for a rich person to enter, they just need to untangle their lives first — Again this just plain bad historical scholarship.

3. [See Edit message below] The camel is a mistranslation of the greek word for rope. The original story talked about a rope passing through the eye of the needle — This doesn’t change the meaning much, although it perhaps softens it a bit. But it does seem designed to make Jesus less zany and hyperbolic. Unfortunately it is also false, the only greek texts we have with ‘rope’ are a thousand years too late for it to be original.

4. Jesus is responding to the arrogance of the rich young man in the previous section. The rich young man claimed to keep the law, but clearly he must have been lying, because nobody can really keep the law. Therefore what Jesus is saying here is “rich people are often arrogant, and it is arrogant people who don’t get to enter the Kingdom”. Therefore if you’re rich, be humble and you can receive the Kingdom. — This is just completely made up. The rich young ruler comes and bows at Jesus’s feet, there’s no indication he is arrogant from the text: he is portrayed as being eager to learn. In fact if anyone can be said to have knocked at the door in this passage, it is him. Unfortunately it is shut in his face. — There are other interpretations of the story of the rich young man, but I don’t want to get caught up in the previous story though – this is about the camel and the needle. We can return to that story in another post.

5. Jesus is making the point that a rich person cannot enter the Kingdom in their own power, but must rely on God — This is perhaps the best approach I’ve heard, but I don’t find it particularly convincing. Most translations mush the two parts of the story together (I’ve separated them, above). Jesus’s response to the rich young man is to send him off depressed – Jesus makes no attempt to introduce him to God’s salvation. Then in the first bit of our passage, there are no verbs of agency. It doesn’t say it is more difficult for a camel to be threaded through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to be able to enter. The verb “to be able” only comes in the disciples’ question: “who is able to save themselves?” – to which Jesus answers that only God has that ability. Jesus is here responding to the disciples’ question, not to the previous statement; and specifically he is responding to the introduction of the verb δύναμαι – this verb of ability, of possibility, and of action, from which we get our word ‘dynamic’. I’ve translated the passage with ‘ability’ to show how this verb comes in, and it is this verb that Jesus then uses back in his response, twice. It is normally translated ‘possible’ in this passage, which is fine, but the verb carries the meaning of action. We might say “it is possible that the stock market will fall this year”, but that wouldn’t be δύναμαι. So I translate “who is able to save themselves” rather that the more traditional “who can be saved”, to reflect this active sense in the greek.

6. [See Edit message below] The hyperbole has a traditional answer. The camel goes through the eye if you first ground it up into powder. The difficulty (again note, it is not impossible) is to get the camel ground up. And doing so will obviously destroy it. Thus Jesus is making the point that you have to lose your life to gain it: only that which is willing to be destroyed can be used by God. I can’t find a pedigree for this interpretation, but again (as in the gate example) it has the effect of softening the starkness of the statement, and providing a recipe for making progress.

So I think this passage isn’t simply ignorable. Jesus doesn’t appear to be saying that rich folks who trust God are okay, because God is able to save them. If so, why send the rich young man away depressed? Why does he only talk about God’s ability to save after overhearing the disciples discussing ability among themselves? Why not make that comment earlier, when it could have been solace to the rich young man? For this passage and others, it seems fairly clear to me that Jesus taught a theology of poverty: a kingdom of God among the poor, in which the rich were not present.

How do you understand this passage? If you are a Christian who thinks that this is an authentic teaching of Jesus, how do you reconcile this with your myriad possessions? If you are not a Christian, do you think that this passage shows that Jesus was fundamentally anti-rich, or was it just a joke?

—

On a completely separate note, there are a couple of interesting little features in this passage that normally slip by unnoticed. First notice that Jesus looks around at the start – he’s just sent the rich young ruler away, and now seems to look around to check he’s not being overheard. Second notice the join between the two parts – the disciples ask each other about salvation, and Jesus watches this for a while before interjecting. Two little character notes that give glimpses into how Mark sees the dynamics of the group.

—

Edit 2010-11-10: Added number 3 above after Shane, in the comments, pointed it out. I had been improperly mushing this and number 2 in my mind, but they are separate things, and the linguistic argument at least has some textual basis.

Edit 2010-12-15: Added number 6 above after Ed, in the comments, suggested it. I haven’t been able to find other evidence on this score, but it is an interesting interpretation.

Tales from the Theological Coal Face

A friend of mine tutors theology and divinity students at the university. He teaches on the introduction to the bible and introduction to church history courses. And tends to be pretty scathing about the standards of students he sees. Part of this is the problem in the UK, where we specialise our students at 16 into three subjects, often they don’t match directly with university courses. So most students can’t do theology A level (they may do Religious Studies, which is somewhat different, but still isn’t available at lots of high-schools), so you can’t assume a theology undergraduate has even basic knowledge of the subject matter.

Still, even accounting for that, there are some really dense folks out there.

This week he reported a conversation with a student that went something like this:

Rev Dr (to seminar group): so can anyone give me an example of a character from history? [yes, really that basic].

Student: erm. Hitler?

Rev Dr: Yes, good. Hitler, so when did Hitler live?

Student: erm, sometime in the 17th or 18th century?

And in case you think that is about as low as you can go, he also tells the story of a student who shuffled up after a session and said “can I ask a question?”, “Certainly” says Rev Dr. “This third century business you keep talking about, what is that?”.

How do you start? Maybe with a big wallchart timeline from Jesus to the present day.

A Song Lyric Flag in the Sand

Years and years ago listening to the radio on a transatlantic flight, I heard a song who’s chorus stuck with me. I can’t find it and it doesn’t google at all, which probably means it was totally obscure and may have only ended up on the in-flight radio because the band knew someone at the firm that compiled the playlist! I’d be curious to track it down. Now the chances of any regular readers of this blog knowing it is slim to none. But since it doesn’t google, this post may be the one google-entry for it, which may at some time in the future bring a fellow searcher here. If that searcher is you, please leave a comment to get in touch!

The lyric is (as best as I can remember, it may be somewhat variant):

I want a girl who chuffs with her mouth like a train.
I want a girl with Carol Vorderman’s brains.
I want a girl as blind as Mr Magoo.
I want a girl, who looks a bit like you.

Answers on a post card please. Normal religious geek service resumes forthwith.

—

Edit: All props to Boz for finding the song:

“chuffs with her mouth like a train” was perhaps the biggest divergence. And interesting how my memory had made the Carol Vorderman bit rhyme with ‘train/drain’. Memory is a really fascinating thing. As per Boz in the comments, the real lyrics are:

A Bit Like You – Wubble U

I like the girl who talks with her mouth full
Who’s clever and nubile and won’t cane me mobile
I like the girl who all me mates scoffed at
A girl from Glamorgan who tinkles me organ

I like the girl who goes out with her own crew
Cos chocolates I bought her don’t taste like they oughta
Who won’t take excuses for love bites and bruises
but buy me jerk chicken from fish kebab indian

I like the girl who ain’t no vibe vacuum
Who’s got an opinion and swears for Great Britain
A girl worth romancing who’s crap at breakdancing
Who’s built like a dust truck and don’t give a monkeys

I like the girl who talks with a mouth like a drain
I like the girl who’s naughty and saucy and game
I like the girl who reads her book in the loo
I like the girl who looks a bit like you

I like the girl who drinks more than I do
With Stoly and beer cans who shouts at away fans
She’ll like a good medley, have tickets for wembley
Like quality bedding and a nosh at the wedding

I like the girl who don’t care who she talks to
A dictionary thwarter, a Lucretia Borgia
I like the girl who’s sniffing the Uhu
So give me that voodoo, that voodoo that you do

I like the girl who talks with a mouth like a drain
I like the girl who’s naughty and saucy and game
I like the girl who reads her book in the loo
I like the girl who looks a bit like you

I like the girl with caviar, champagne and chips
I like the girl with Carol Vorderman lips
I like the girl who’s blind as Mr Magoo
I like the girl who looks a bit like you

’nuff said.