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# Tim Minchin - Storm - atter en gang
- URL: https://tjomlid.com/tim-minchin-storm-atter-en-gang/
- Published: 2010-08-11T09:51:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-03-08T23:57:40.000Z
- Author: Gunnar R. Tjomlid
- Tags: Bloggpost, PublishedPost, #substack, #substack-type-newsletter, #substack-access-only_paid, #Import 2024-12-22 18:32

Enda en versjon av Tim Minchins helt fantastiske og skepsis-orgasmiske beat-poesi, Storm. Se den!

Snart blir den også [animasjonsfilm](http://www.stormmovie.net/blog/?ref=tjomlid.com) \- og jeg skal se dens premiere 16\. oktober på [TAM London](http://www.tamlondon.org/?ref=tjomlid.com) \- yey!

En liten preview:

Og her er hele teksten:

### **Storm**

Inner North London, top floor flat  
All white walls, white carpet, white cat,  
Rice Paper partitions  
Modern art and ambition  
The host’s a physician,  
Lovely bloke, has his own practice  
His girlfriend’s an actress  
An old mate from home  
And they’re always great fun.  
So to dinner we’ve come.

The 5th guest is an unknown,  
The hosts have just thrown  
Us together for a favour  
because this girl’s just arrived from Australia  
And has moved to North London  
And she’s the sister of someone  
Or has some connection.

As we make introductions  
I’m struck by her beauty  
She’s irrefutably fair  
With dark eyes and dark hair  
But as she sits  
I admit I’m a little bit wary  
because I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy  
Tattooed on that popular area  
Just above the derrière  
And when she says “I’m Sagittarien”  
I confess a pigeonhole starts to form  
And is immediately filled with pigeon  
When she says her name is Storm.

Chatter is initially bright and light hearted  
But it’s not long before Storm gets started:  
“You can’t know anything,  
Knowledge is merely opinion”  
She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon  
Vis a vis  
Some unhippily  
Empirical comment by me

“Not a good start” I think  
We’re only on pre-dinner drinks  
And across the room, my wife  
Widens her eyes  
Silently begs me, Be Nice  
A matrimonial warning  
Not worth ignoring  
So I resist the urge to ask Storm  
Whether knowledge is so loose-weave  
Of a morning  
When deciding whether to leave  
Her apartment by the front door  
Or a window on the second floor.

The food is delicious and Storm,  
Whilst avoiding all meat  
Happily sits and eats  
While the good doctor, slightly pissedly  
Holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history  
When Storm suddenly she insists  
“But the human body is a mystery!  
Science just falls in a hole  
When it tries to explain the the nature of the soul.”

My hostess throws me a glance  
She, like my wife, knows there’s a chance  
That I’ll be off on one of my rants  
But my lips are sealed.  
I just want to enjoy my meal  
And although Storm is starting to get my goat  
I have no intention of rocking the boat,  
Although it’s becoming a bit of a wrestle  
Because – like her meteorological namesake -  
Storm has no such concerns for our vessel:

“Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy  
They promote drug dependency  
At the cost of the natural remedies  
That are all our bodies need  
They are immoral and driven by greed.  
Why take drugs  
When herbs can solve it?  
Why use chemicals  
When homeopathic solvents  
Can resolve it?  
It’s time we all return-to-live  
With natural medical alternatives.”

And try as hard as I like,  
A small crack appears  
In my diplomacy-dike.  
“By definition”, I begin  
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue  
“Has either not been proved to work,  
Or been proved not to work.  
You know what they call “alternative medicine”  
That’s been proved to work?  
Medicine.”

“So you don’t believe  
In ANY Natural remedies?”

“On the contrary actually:  
Before we came to tea,  
I took a natural remedy  
Derived from the bark of a willow tree  
A painkiller that’s virtually side-effect free  
It’s got a weird name,  
Darling, what was it again?  
Masprin?  
Basprin?  
Asprin!  
Which I paid about a buck for  
Down at my local drugstore.

The debate briefly abates  
As our hosts collects plates  
but as they return with desserts  
Storm pertly asserts,

“Shakespeare said it first:  
There are more things in heaven and earth  
Than exist in your philosophy…  
Science is just how we’re trained to look at reality,  
It can’t explain love or spirituality.  
How does science explain psychics?  
Auras; the afterlife; the power of prayer?”

I’m becoming aware  
That I’m staring,  
I’m like a rabbit suddenly trapped  
In the blinding headlights of vacuous crap.  
Maybe it’s the Hamlet she just misquothed  
Or the eighth glass of wine I just quaffed  
But my diplomacy dike groans  
And the arsehole held back by its stones  
Can be held back no more:

“Look , Storm, I don’t mean to bore you  
But there’s no such thing as an aura!  
Reading Auras is like reading minds  
Or star-signs or tea-leaves or meridian lines  
These people aren’t plying a skill,  
They are either lying or mentally ill.  
Same goes for those who claim to hear God’s demands  
And Spiritual healers who think they have magic hands.

By the way,  
Why is it OK  
For people to pretend they can talk to the dead?  
Is it not totally fucked in the head  
Lying to some crying woman whose child has died  
And telling her you’re in touch with the other side?  
That’s just fundamentally sick  
Do we need to clarify that there’s no such thing as a psychic?  
What, are we fucking 2?  
Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?  
Do we still think that Santa brings us gifts?  
That Michael Jackson hasn’t had facelifts?  
Are we still so stunned by circus tricks  
That we think that the dead would  
Wanna talk to pricks  
Like John Edwards?

Storm to her credit despite my derision  
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision  
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition

“You’re so sure of your position  
But you’re just closed-minded  
I think you’ll find  
Your faith in Science and Tests  
Is just as blind  
As the faith of any fundamentalist”

“Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit  
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.  
Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed  
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.  
If you show me  
That, say, homeopathy works,  
Then I will change my mind  
I’ll spin on a fucking dime  
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,  
But I will run through the streets yelling  
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!  
Water has memory!  
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite  
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

You show me that it works and how it works  
And when I’ve recovered from the shock  
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.”

Everyones just staring at me now,  
But I’m pretty pissed and I’ve dug this far down,  
So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound:

“Life is full of mysteries, yeah  
But there are answers out there  
And they won’t be found  
By people sitting around  
Looking serious  
And saying isn’t life mysterious?  
Let’s sit here and hope  
Let’s call up the fucking Pope  
Let’s go watch Oprah  
Interview Deepak Chopra

If you’re going to watch tele, you should watch Scooby Doo.  
That show was so cool  
because every time there’s a church with a ghoul  
Or a ghost in a school  
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?  
The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the waterslide.  
Throughout history  
Every mystery  
EVER solved has turned out to be  
Not Magic.

Does the idea that there might be truth  
Frighten you?  
Does the idea that one afternoon  
On Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you  
Frighten you?  
Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural  
So blow your hippy noodle  
That you would rather just stand in the fog  
Of your inability to Google?

Isn’t this enough?  
Just this world?  
Just this beautiful, complex  
Wonderfully unfathomable world?  
How does it so fail to hold our attention  
That we have to diminish it with the invention  
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?  
If you’re so into Shakespeare  
Lend me your ear:  
“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,  
To throw perfume on the violet… is just fucking silly”  
Or something like that.  
Or what about Satchmo?!  
I see trees of Green,  
Red roses too,  
And fine, if you wish to  
Glorify Krishna and Vishnu  
In a post-colonial, condescending  
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way  
That’s ok.  
But here’s what gives me a hard-on:  
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.  
I have one life, and it is short  
And unimportant…  
But thanks to recent scientific advances  
I get to live twice as long as my great great great great uncles and auntses.  
Twice as long to live this life of mine  
Twice as long to love this wife of mine  
Twice as many years of friends and wine  
Of sharing curries and getting shitty  
With good-looking hippies  
With fairies on their spines  
And butterflies on their titties.

And if perchance I have offended  
Think but this and all is mended:  
We’d as well be 10 minutes back in time,  
For all the chance you’ll change your mind.