H
Hamburger restaurant
A quick service catering establishment.
There is no profit in catering for individual taste. The big markup comes when there is blandness, when there is uniformity, and thus was the hamburger restaurant born. An exercise in insipidness coupled to an obsession with hygiene, a place where cardboard would taste better, a Sunday gathering place for certain male progenitors and their estranged offspring.
Hate
An extreme form of dislike for something or somebody.
Most prophets or messiahs preached love, many current religious leaders preach the opposite. Hate comes when people have not been listening to their god. It comes when people are not certain about their own belief. If you can’t understand the tenets of your own religion then don’t let it worry you, just hate someone who is certain in theirs.
Health
The opposite of sickness.
On the whole we prefer to be healthy, it is something we aspire to even when we know we are going to die in the end. And because we want to be healthy there will always be someone there willing to sell us the service, or at least manage it for us.
Health care professionals
Those concerned with the physical wellbeing of others.
A very wide ranging group which presumably goes all the way from senior consultant surgeons down to very junior nurses, may even include porters and laboratory assistants though not of course domestics and toilet cleaners. And somewhere in the middle, or at the top as they would prefer to see it, are the managers, that marriage of accountancy and efficiency and medicine, a profession for those who could not become doctors, or nurses, or even domestics and toilet cleaners. See also hospital.
Health foods
Those foods which, apparently, do not kill.
Those foods which do make cardboard taste interesting, that excuse for otherwise rational people to destroy their health by becoming hypochondriacs. Simply another invention of the marketing men.
Hell
The opposite of Heaven.
Apparently it is a state of non being. More likely it is a place where God wishes She was most of the time, a place which would probably not be necessary if people truly had faith, or a belief, in God.
Heresy
Holding beliefs which are not those of the established church, or government, or majority opinion.
Like so much else in religion, it is a crime invented by people who are weak in their own belief, but then again it could be putting HP Sauce on good food, or even the belief that Tchaikovsky was one of the great composers.
Hero
A person who has been conspicuously brave.
Religions need martyrs, political creeds need heroes, both need someone who becomes an icon for the inadequate among their followers, a psychopath who has been laundered by history. In fact the true hero is someone who disagrees with the opinions of a tabloid newspaper and is willing to speak out. .Now those men who boast about having a big penis, they are the ones who put great store by courage. The rest of us know that it is a blindness brought about by desperation. And we are the ones who have to evict the double glazing salesman from our doorstep, or ask for edible food in a whole food restaurant. See also guts.
Heterosexual
One who has a preference for making love to members of the opposite sex.
Some 90% of the world’s population are said to be heterosexual, or ‘straight’ as they like to call themselves, and they fell this gives them the right to impose their standards on the rest of us, even those of us who are sometimes straight and sometimes not. So who then are these heterosexuals, the ones who shout so loud about their sexuality? They are those who believe, against all the odds, that opposites attract. They are those who have found a definition for the word ‘normal’ at whatever the cost to others. Most of all, if they are men, they are those who find it difficult to make love standing up.
Hippie
An historical person who believed in love and peace, lots of dope, and sex, and very loud music.
What you were not if you can remember being one. Something I was not at the time, but did become later. Something other people were at the time, and have since given up.
History
The study of the past.
There was a time when only kings existed as personalities and most soldiers were mere statistics, a fiction which has been made respectable. That is one view of history. Another holds that it is the study of accidents, something from which we can learn. If the First World War is anything to go by then the first view is still the more popular.
Hitch
(1) To tie or attach to.
(2) A minor problem.
There is also a slang term, to get hitched, which means to get married, so draw your own conclusions.
Holiday
(1) A day or day on which no work is done, originally a ‘holy day’.
(2) An absence from work which is not due to illness or domestic trauma.
A yearly nervous breakdown which is financed and condoned by the employer. And did you know; on a list of the traumas which most of us will suffer in our lives, the annual holiday is right up there alongside the death of a loved one or the divorce of a not so loved one.
Home improvements
Alterations to a house.
Generally they are not, at least not to the basic fabric of the house. They are loft conversions where the children would be ashamed to take their friends, or patio extensions where you can freeze to death while drinking the cocktails you can’t afford. Mostly they involve replacing long living natural wood with short life plastic, an attempt to justify outrageous housing costs.
Homelessness
The state of not having anywhere to live.
I once tried to find the antonym for homelessness and there wasn’t one, apart from ‘normal’ that is. So homelessness is an inability to accept the fact that building societies were created by God, a freedom to be despised by those who do have homes, an exercise in choice having spent too long in the home of one’s parents.
Honesty
An exercise in veracity.
A much prized virtue and yet it can be any statement which requires less space than an expedient lie, poetic writing without style, the art of making self interest appear reasonable or the last resort of those who practice damage limitation.
Honeymoon
A short holiday taken after a wedding.
We talk of a honeymoon period as a time when we are looking to see if things will work out but surely, in the case of a marriage, this is something which should be done before the wedding and not when the parties involved are getting drunk on the Costa Del Sol. A honeymoon is something which people do when they don’t want to think of the implications of what they have just done. A honeymoon is probably the first step in the process of getting divorced. See also marriage.
Hospital
A place for the treatment of the sick.
Things have changed since the days when a hospital was ruled by a matron, who in turn owed her heritage to a mother superior. Now it is an institution staffed mainly by administrators, and when run by a Health Care Trust it becomes an institution with very little future, but when it is private then it is a proof that accountants got it right when those who practice the healing arts did not. See also health care professionals.
Human being
A member of the higher order of homo sapiens.
Monkeys are members of the same generic group. And it has been said that if you sat sufficient monkeys down, with sufficient word processors, then eventually they would come up with the complete works of William Shakespeare. So far no monkeys have volunteered for the experiment.
Humanitarian issue
An altruistic concern for the welfare of others.
It used to be called starvation, or good old fashioned warfare, but either way it was something that man deliberately did to man rather than something God inadvertently did to man. Now it is called a humanitarian issue and is mainly First World guilt over what has happened in the rest of the world.
Human rights
The basic rights of all peoples as laid down by various international treaties.
If we had been listening to God, or to Her nice son Jesus, then we might wonder why it was necessary to codify such things. We did not listen to them. We listened to the politicians and the priests instead. So where do we go from here?
Humour
The opposite of tragedy.
I do believe there are those who make a study of it, which is probably a better thing to do with it than those who watch it, or read it, or listen to it. For them it is a fleeting moment, constantly re-created, because then have no sense of it themselves. For others it could almost certainly the opposite of faith, a case of agreeing with God rather than worshipping Her.
Hygiene
The art of staying clean.
And here we are looking at theology for the analy retentive, the principal religion of those who own hamburger restaurants.
Hypocrisy
Saying, or believing, one thing then doing something totally different.
There are just so many examples, and almost all of them emanating from those who do the ruling rather than those who are ruled. Charging tax on tobacco to pay for the health warnings is one. Men of religion who preach the love of God while condoning the use of weapons is another. In the end it is that which all politicians practice, as a matter of course, part of their inability to lie convincingly. And it is something I am never guilty of because it is a crime which can only be committed by others.
