Today, in Calypso's absence, me and Spirita did domestic. We're not using the dishwasher due to it's huge water consumption. Personally, I'm not sure what's the point, as water bill comes based on how much water they expect you will use. It's the water board as envisaged by Philip K. Dick! She brought her DVD collection down - ah! You never did see such a beautiful sight! I am proud to live in a house with that selection of films on the shelf, even if none of them are mine. Particularly looking forward to rewatching Brief Encounter and Heavenly Creatures (with much kleenex), and diving into Spirita's collection of kitch tat - including Tarantula!, Reefer Madness, Freaks and Brain of Blood. We talked bad movies for a bit - I think the new Taking of Pelham 123 is Tony Scott , from Spirita's description.

We watched Blake's 7, and discussed our contingency plan for - what else - the zombie apocalypse. I want to hide upstairs - I figure that zombies can't climb stairs. Too stupid, and they don't lift their feet high enough. Spirita was more in favour of funnelling them into the hall, and us killing them one at a time. We have a lot of spare kitchen knives and Spirita, who originates from Luton,claims she got a "GSCE in shanking"...other plans include:

• Molotov cocktails, using the huge surplus of nasty glasses left by previous occupants
• Using Vapilla as bait
• Using my rape alarm - to repel them, hopefully, but if the sound attracts them then we're gonna throw it next door
• Electrocuting them, using the dodgy connection in the kitchen. Spirita isn't sure this would kill them, just make them crazier. I hope it would give them intelligence, a la Frankenstein, and then we could reason with them.

As we're all girls, and zombie movies are rarely just about zombies, I've an urge to make a feminist zombie movie. Men turn them into soulless, brainless slaves! It's the ravening hoards of the patriarchy! I've a particularly nice image of zombies-in-Stepford, with these glammed up 60s housewives gnawing on bones and being attacked with baking trays and hair dryers.

In the reorganisation process, I found a nice jar for putting pens in. I plan to move this to my desk, if and when I get one, but for now it is in the lounge. I looked in it - clean enough - but at the bottom was something strange. It was a ring. The most beautiful ring I have ever seen, with a huge stone that shines blue from the inside. Fantasy novels - childhood, even - has set precedents for what to do on finding a magic ring, especially unnaturally gorgeous ones. I should really have buried it in the garden or something already - instead, I have strung it on a string and am wearing it in the hope it contains magic powers.

Spirita awoke with an urge to visit a museum, so this afternoon we trammed off to the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. We talked Jack the Ripper, Queen Anne and Robbie Ross on the tube. When we arrived, I insisted on visiting the Christian Bookshop across the road.

I have nothing against religion per se - although it often conflicts my prime directive of open mindedness, faith is a beautiful thing. But I do find religious literature very very funny, I was rewarded with a whole wall of leaflets. The first I chose for it's striking use of metaphor. "Is there a God within my reach?" asks a man on a cliff, looking down into the VOID of DEATH. Open it up, and the man is smiling - the CROSS has appeared between his cliff and God's cliff. Aw. I think, for now, I'll continue filling the void with "all kinds of temporary pleasures and suspect "spiritual" practices and theories".

On the topic of suspect theories, I capped this off with two mini-comic books entitled "There go the dinosaurs!" and "Big daddy?".The first starts innocently enough, with a bunch of Neanderthals killing a dinosaur to eat - though they call them "dragons", because they were only renamed dinosaurs in 1841. Nevermind the fact humans and dinosaurs never co-existed. Then Evil Atheist Scientist, who I'm naming Alan after Green Wing, comes up and tells us dinosaurs were killed by a meteor. Is this true, asks the pamphlet? At this point, I kinda hoped it would tell us that actually, it was the result of the Fifth Doctor smushing a Cyber-controlled freighter into prehistoric earth. But I quote:

"No! It is a story told by people who don't trust God. And God should know. After all, He was there. So what did God say happened? God created man, animals and plants - In the same week! They were created, not evolved. That includes the dinosaurs!"

This is capped by a rather charming picture of koalas, lions, peacocks, zebras and brontosauruses ambling about in the Garden of Eden. Then we see the dinosaurs joining the animals, two by two, on Noah's arc. Here follows an explanation of rock stratas:

"The storm hit, the earth went into convulsions, the underground water shattered the earth's surfaces, the canopy of water above the earth collapsed. Plants, animals and people were drowned and sandwiched with the dinosaurs into layers of mud and rock."

This still doesn't explain why there are no dinosaurs. But fret not! The millions of destroyed plants had made the air rich with oxygen, and big animals need lots of oxygen to survive. Without the plants, "it was harder to breathe - they got slower and easier to catch. And now you know how the dinosaurs really died. Because of sin, the Lord destroyed the earth by water. But the next time...IT WILL BE BY FIRE!"

My dinosaur-obsessed cousins could punch holes straight through it. What about the little dinosaurs? What about the big mammals? And then it decends into familiar religiosity, ending with the punchline "It's not about what happened to the dinosaurs. It's where YOU will go when you die."

"Big Daddy?" has a picture of a monkey on the front, and is even better. It consists of a dialogue between Alan the Evolution Teacher and a clean-cut Christian boy. Obviously, the Christian quickly demolishes Alan's every argument till Alan resigns, gets thrown out and presumably dies on the street.

The basis of the pamphlet may be correct. As my anthropologist sister explained just before I left, there are holes in Continental Drift big enough to row Gondwanaland through - scientists have tended to make the facts fit the popular theory, and not the other way around. When Christian boy claims only one of the six facets of evolution has been conclusively proved, the rest are taken on trust by the scientific establishment, I've half a mind to agree with him. But that doesn't excuse the genius histrionics in this book - including a chart of monkey evolution, and how all the stages have been proved incorrect. Cro Magnon man? "Equal in physique and brain capacity to modern man. So what's the differance?" Vestigal bones in humans and whales? "Isn't losing something the opposite of evolution?", a stupid statement if ever I heard one. Peter Gabriel's departure from Genesis was part of their evolution as a band - evolution merely means change, usually positive. Christian boy's trump statement is in bringing up "gluons", something invented by scientists to explain why the positive charges in the nucleus don't repel each other - when clearly, it's God holding it together instead. While Alan gets himself sacked, Christian boy gets chatting to some pleasantly 70s student. One, with a tash and a pullover, cries "then we didn't evolve! The system has been feeding us THE BIG LIE. We really do have souls!". It's a bit of a jump.

I also bought a pack of shiny Jesus stickers. In retrospect, I should have got the angry homophobic sticker reading "how can a moral wrong be a civil right? Read the Bible!" with directions to Leviticus 18. But it would have made me too angry having it about. At least believing the dinosaurs choked to death hurts no one.

Later, Spirita challenged me - if God was to suddenly appear on a cloud and say "You know, the gays are scum, and the place of women is under men, and all non-believers will fry", and I was given the option between recanting my beliefs or serving him, what would I choose? I said I'd convert - seems like a fairly simple option to me - though apparently Calypso said she'd rather burn. Heroic martyrdom is a little different when it's an all-powerful-fella on a cloud.

The Museum itself was amazing, though I imagine it must have been torment to a child. None of those items were meant to be in cages. They had a human sized one of those pin-boards, where you make an impression with your hand. Spirita tried doing the Han-Solo-In-Carbonite look - then we covered it in handprints, and signed our names at the bottom. There was a dolls cabinet, one of teddy bears, one of Meccano and Lego - one of sci fi, which inevitably contained the Moxx of Balhoon, but also a little Corgi Liberator. Very cute indeed. They had a lifesize killer Gollywog, a pink pedal-airplane, zoetropes, rocking horses, and a huge Venetian puppet theatre as tall as the roof. We found a huge magnetic-beard boards - I made my face look like the Master (80s), complete with eeevil eyebrows - Spirita turned hers into something closer to the Elephant Man. We also had great fun in the "sensory experience" - mirrors, lights, colours and New Age music. We attempted to communicate with dolphins and raise our heart chakras to eleventh level consciousness, though I didn't do too well for laughing so hard. We also played with the animal theatre, though the flashing lights made it seem a bit more nightclubesque - Watership Downtown - the tales of Farthing Ghetto. This was interspersed with art inspired by childhood. Imagine a see through rubix cube, about six squares by six, and place a room in each box - a lunar surface, a room with trains on the walls, stairs that lead nowhere et al. Marvellous!

We were both much inspired by the experience - we're gonna get a dolls house with a revolving bookcase, a Victorian paper theatre, and make a fairy in a jar, and also make some Edwardian alphabet blocks to decorate the house with. To start with.

In other news, I'm really enjoying The Four Feathers, and getting into Nick Cave. Particularly Red Right Hand - it's literally only a harmonica away from being the aural equivalent of Sergio Leone. Reminds me a lot of High Planes Drifter, for the scene with the paint among other things. When I get my piano back, I'm going to learn Curse of Millhaven - it's about a crazy girl who is slowly wiping everyone in her little town out. Now I read that back it sounds very incriminating...