Why 'Methuselah papers'? OK, it's a joke. Methuselah is a biblical patriarch and figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, who lived to 969 years: the longest life of all human beings, in the line from Adam to Noah.

To have Methuselah pinned at the head of the page, as we write or read this paper here, is a persistent prompt to beware patriarchy, delusions of continuity or bloodline, clinging and craving, factionalism and essentialism, a Promised Land or a Chosen or any other kind of supremacy; mythologising, cultural hegemony and adherence to any Book and priesthood.