Rosa Rubicondior

Firstly, Rosa Rubicondior is not my real name. It is from the Latin, rosa rubicundior, lilo candidior, omnibus formosior, semper in te glorior (redder than the rose, whiter than the lilies, lovelier than all others, I will always glory in thee). The only significance is that, when I was a radical lefty I wrote a weekly column in a magazine and wanted something red for a pen name. I found it in the lyrics on the sleeve of Carmina Burana, a mediaeval poem in German and Latin which was set to music by Carl Orff and which was very popular in the 1960s.

I toyed with Rufa Tunica (Red Shirt), which is also in the lyrics, but in the end settled for Rosa Rubicondior. The name lay dormant for some 35 years until I resurrected it for this blog. It was only later that I realised I had misspelled it slightly; it should have been Rosa Rubicundior.

My reason for wishing to be anonymous was that I originally intended my Rosa Rubicondior blog to be about UK politics and, as a part-time employee of an NHS Trust and a former member of the senior management team of a one, I wanted to be free to comment on the NHS without compromising my employers and jeopardising my position. It was only later that I discovered blogging about Atheism, Humanism, religious apologetics and, especially, biological science was actually closer to my interests as I got pulled more and more into Atheism vs religious fundamentalism and creationism, especially in their right-wing political forms.

The decision to be anonymous has since been vindicated by the threats and campaign of lies and vilification to which I have been subjected by religious extremists, psychopaths, obsessively psychotic stalkers and inadequate characters with self-evident personality disorders on Twitter and elsewhere. Religion, it seems, is a fertile breeding-ground for inadequate nutters looking for an excuse for their antisocial behaviour and a justification for their hate campaigns as they try to make their own little lives have some sort of importance by constant attention-seeking and pathetic displays of what power the Internet gives them to pester others. In pre-Internet days, these sad individuals and failures of the mental health services would have been restricted to standing at their windows shouting abuse at strangers in the street, stealing underwear off washing lines at night or posting anonymous poison-pen letters to neighbours.

Then of course there are the seriously dangerous individuals who believe they know what their god thinks and who it hates and have decided it requires their help to hand down punishments. I have no intention of exposing my family to these deranged individuals whose 'love' for humanity involves cutting heads of.

Anyway, enough of why I use a pseudonym.

I was born and brought up in a small North Oxfordshire village during the post-war baby boom and have had a love of nature since before I can remember. I was one of the five children of the daughter of a Cotswold shepherd of some renown and a car factory worker and former soldier who was rescued from Dunkirk and spent the last three years of World War II in India where he learned to speak fluent Hindi. By any standards we were poor and grew most of the food we ate in our garden and on a allotment on the edge of the village. In some respects we were close to hunter-gatherers and never passed by a chance to gather firewood from the woods and fields when a large elm tree fell or shed a branch, to collect watercress from the banks of the Evenlode and to gather mushrooms from the fields in Autumn. We took other free food from the countryside too but we needn't dwell too much on that here.

I don't remember learning to read but I read anything I could get my hands on, especially anything to do with nature. I realised I was an Atheist when I was nine years old when it suddenly dawned on me that not all religions could be right, but they could all be wrong. Since there was no more reason to suppose only ours was the right one while all the others were, and had been, wrong, the most sensible view was that they were all wrong. I have been an atheist ever since.

On leaving school with a few 'O' levels, I worked as a laboratory technician for Oxford University on a Medical Research Council grant, working my way up to Senior Technician and gaining an ONC in Science, an HNC in Applied Biology, and state registration as a Medical Laboratory Technician, and co-authoring a paper on reproductive physiology in guinea pigs in the process.

After eleven years I was made redundant when the government cut back on research spending and, disillusioned and needing a job, I decided on a change of career and joined the Ambulance Service. Using my medical and biological knowledge I became one of the first UK Paramedics and an instructor, eventually working my way through the ranks to become a Control Room Manager, gained a postgraduate Diploma In Management Studies at Oxford Brookes University, taught myself computer programming and became the Trust's Information Manager and Data Protection Officer. I formally retired nearly six years ago but was asked to return part-time as a performance information analyst and deployment planning consultant.

I have been a socialist and trades unionist since my teens and have been a member of the Labour Party for about thirty years. Briefly, during the early 1970s, I was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain but left after a couple of years when I realised it was as dogmatic and cultic as a fundamentalist religious cult and quite incapable of holding rational debates about policy and changing to meet the changing needs of a post-industrial economy. Within twenty years, Communist regimes in Eastern Europe were collapsing under their own inertia and irrelevance and the people of Eastern Europe were taking their countries back. The collapse of capitalism, the inevitability of history and the establishment of the Socialist Utopia that Marx had predicted had always been a delusion on a par with the delusion of an eternal life in Paradise after death, and a protective magic man in the sky. It was nothing more than a promise of jam tomorrow.

So that's me: a materialist rationalist who took a decision to be led by the evidence many years ago and who thinks the Universe is wonderful enough without magic and forever-hidden mystery, and that being an evolved ape, 3.5 billion years in the making, is infinitely more marvelous than being the unworthy product of a magician who made me out of dirt.