This is Steve

Four days to go!

2011-04-19T16:26:00.000+01:00

Tired

2011-03-24T22:06:00.000Z

A quick glance at some of the synonyms for "tired" reveals that there are lots of ways to say "I feel lacking in energy." I suspect it's a common human experience to be fatigued, worn out, whacked, flagging and bushed. It's certainly a common experience for me. I was reflecting the other day that I genuinely can't remember what it feels like to be refreshed, to feel not-weary. I wake up tired, spend the day in a state of tiredness and at some point in the evening am so tired that I can no longer do anything but go to bed. There isn't (I am fairly sure) any point of the day when, given some peace and a modicum of comfort, I couldn't easily fall asleep. I don't even need the peace and comfort - I've fallen asleep on a bus at 9 o'clock in the morning. So saying "I'm tired" doesn't really mean anything any more; it's as informative as "I'm breathing" or "I exist" - true, but generally able to be taken as read.

So when, as last night, I'm woken up at 2am by a vomiting child, how do I choose an appropriate synonym to describe my state at 10pm the following evening? I'm not sure that there's a single word or simple phrase that conveys the sensation of my head being both light and heavy, of my synapses being cotton-wool-balled to slowness; the effort of will to lift each leaden leg in turn up the stairs; eyes that burn until I close them and then burn until I open them; the disquiet of a noise that I can't hear distractingly invading my middle ear. Which word can convey the sense that there is so much to do, so much that will not be done, that tomorrow lurks only a few hours away with its own cargo of deeds and requirements and that sleep, sleep, no matter if it be brief or deep, will not, cannot hope to be enough?

Spring news

2011-03-23T19:53:00.000Z

I've been in a kind of hibernation as far as writing anything for public consumption is concerned. It's not been the short winter days (though it is wonderful to see some sunshine again) but rather some of the murkier areas of my psyche that have slowed me down. The problem with ferreting around in your own soul is that some of the things that are unearthed become, well, preoccupying. I can't/won't write about them, but it's hard to write about anything else. I wonder if this is what newspaper editors have felt like over the past weeks - no matter how great your gossip and human interest stories are, Global Catastrophe pushes them off the front page every time.

You get what you give

2011-03-09T20:42:00.000Z

I've been absent from online life for a while, barring the odd Facebook post. Last month I got so busy with the pantomime (review here) that I didn't have time to do any writing, and then... well, it was kind of hard to get back into it. There was always something else that I needed to do, and I wasn't sure that I had anything I wanted to say. Lots that I could have said, but not sure that I wanted to say it.

At the same time I had to miss church on a couple of Sundays (again, too much to do and only limited time to do it), and then because Rachel had extra dance lessons and Katrina was finishing up her dissertation I didn't get to small group on Tuesdays either. Unfortunately, with the exception of passing brief conversations at work, church and small group are my social world, so once I missed them I had cut down my contact with friends by about 95%. And at that point - because it was easy, because I was probably a bit stressed out and busy and a bit lonely, I started to succumb to self-pity. Why, I wondered, had nobody from small group phoned or emailed or sent a message via Facebook to see if I was OK? Sure, I'd said I wasn't going to be there for a few weeks, but surely someone would say "Have you heard from Steve?" and someone else would say "I'll give him a call during the week"? I began to wonder what would happen if I didn't go back. How long would it be before someone said something?

Thankfully all these maudlin and self-centred thoughts were stopped one day, when it occurred to me that I have never done for anyone else the things that I wished they would do for me. I don't call people, or send them messages, even if I KNOW that they're having a tough time. Sure, we don't have friends who drop by unexpectedly (well, none who are aged over 18), but I've never in the 12 years we've lived here gone round to someone's house uninvited just to say hello, see how they're doing, have a chat. I don't make any contact with people who I think of as my friends except when we get together for a common purpose on a Sunday morning or Tuesday evening; accusing anyone else of not making the effort is decidedly in the "throw the first stone" category.

Oh, and for anyone thinking that the title of this post seems familiar: New Radicals.

Decomposition

2011-02-02T09:46:00.000Z

I recently buried Shadow, the last of our gerbils. He has joined the rest of the pets who have died in the last ten years or so, in his own spot in the garden. Digging a grave, even a gerbil-sized one, is a strange activity. Physically attacking the soil with the spade feels therapeutic when you're sad, but at the back of your mind is the knowledge that soon you'll be filling it in over a little body.
I can't help wondering at what point in prehistory people first formulated the idea that we are made of the same stuff as the ground. There must have been some point when the sum of human knowledge first contained the idea that if you leave a dead body long enough it turns into something that looks less like a body and more like the ground. I'm sure that there are paleoanthropologists who have theories about how this happened - did someone bury excess meat for safekeeping, like a dog with a bone, only to discover that it had changed when they went back to it? Or did dead members of the tribe get put in the same special place, so that there was an opportunity to see how the older bodies were different from the more recent ones?
It's frustrating that there is so much I know nothing about!

I know the heart of life is good

2011-02-01T14:54:00.000Z

I was trying to think of a word to describe how I'm feeling - busy, too much to do, over-stressed, but yet feeling something that isn't exactly "everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds" optimism, but is a certainty that things are going to be OK. Then I remembered this song.

B&Q pricing scam

2011-01-31T10:33:00.000Z

I went into B&Q yesterday to get some bits and pieces to reinforce the stairgate, which was no longer Oscar-proof. I was going to buy an enormous sheet of hardboard, because it was only a few pence more than a sheet about a third of the size, but then I realised I'd have nowhere to keep the offcuts, so I went on my way, muttering about how buying the smaller version of something makes it more expensive, etc, etc, looking for a roll of gaffer tape. Finding the right aisle, I was pleased to see that there was a plastic bin of "Value" tape. "Excellent," I thought, "I can save a bit of money after all."

But hang on, those Value rolls don't look as big as the standard tape on the shelf above. Let's have a closer look. Hmmm... the Value tape is 10 metres long. while B&Q's standard tape has 25 metres on the roll. "Let's see," I wondered, "How does that work out in pence per metre? Oh, wait - it's written on the price ticket."

That's right: the "Value" tape is 39.8p per metre, while the standard tape is 23.9p per metre.

So, B&Q, what's your definition of "Value"? Because I suspect that most of your customers think that it means "cheap" or "a better deal", not "actually more expensive". There is no way that a roll of tape that is both shorter and costs more per metre can be described as a "value" product, and putting an orange and white "B&Q Value" label on it does not make it so; this is either a mistake or a deliberate attempt to mislead in the interest of profit.

Showstopper

2011-01-29T19:06:00.000Z

If you've not already done so, start listening to Showstopper on BBC Radio 4, 6.30pm Wednesdays. It's a half an hour show, during which a group of incredibly talented singer/actor/comedians improvise an entire musical, using suggestions from the audience. It sounds bizarre, but it's the most addictively funny thing I've heard in a long time.

You can also hear it on iPlayer.

Sabbath

2011-01-28T11:46:00.000Z

I seem to be getting into a habit of writing these blog posts on the bus to work - hence the lack of links or pictures - basically because it's free time with an internet connection. The fact that I don't seem to have time during the rest of the day struck me particularly this morning, because I was already thinking about Sabbath.
My Bible reading this morning was the passage in Exodus containing the 10 Commandments. Now it doesn't matter if you think that the 10 Commandments are the actual words of God, or if you think they're a Bronze Age social code with a tag saying 'And by the way God says this, so you'd better do as you're told'; the point is the same: a day of rest is not recommended, but mandated.
I don't keep this commandment. Over the years I've broken them all except for one, but right now the issue for me is that I don't have sanctioned, agreed, planned-for downtime. Instead what I have is a never-ending to-do list, and hours or days when I think 'I'm too tired, I can't be bothered, I've had enough of this,' and I then do what should be leisure activities while feeling guilty for wasting time.
Of course this isn't good, and I know I should make a change, give myself permission to chill out, even plan a deliberate Sabbath, but the truth is that even thinking about it makes me begin to panic that I have too much to do and not enough time. Planned rest may be such a good idea that ancient societies (or even God) said we should do it, but there are too many things I've got to get done.

Finding faults

2011-01-27T11:38:00.000Z

I had my first lesson yesterday for my Part 2 exam, the second stage in becoming a driving instructor. I'm hopefully going to be taking my Part 1 (Theory) in the next couple of weeks, but I have to have 18 hours instruction before my Part 2, so the lessons need to start now. I'd been thinking about how I drive over the last couple of months, trying to spot and eliminate bad habits, but it turned out yesterday that my main driving fault is one I wasn't even aware I had. I change gear too soon, even changing up as I steer round corners. Not necessarily life-threatening, but enough to fail my test.
It did make me think, though, about my other faults, in other areas of my life. I can list lots of things about me that need working on - some urgently - but there must be some faults of which I an completely unaware. Which is why I need genuine friends, who will point out the problems I hadn't noticed - and why I'm not being much of a friend if I won't do the same for them.

Is it just me, or is this a bit creepy? (Potato smiles)

2011-01-25T18:04:00.000Z

Essential historical metaphor no. 43

2011-01-24T18:39:00.000Z

Genuine dinner-table conversation:
My son: Are there any European countries that haven't kicked the Jews out?
Me: Probably not, at some point in history
My son: So Europe is basically musical chairs for the Jews?
Me: Erm... Yes.

Book review: Pistache by Sebastian Faulks

2011-01-22T18:59:00.000Z

Over the last couple of nights I've read "Pistache" by Sebastian Faulks, which is, according to the cover "A collection of fanciful, satirical and surprising parodies, squibs and pastiches inspired by The Write Stuff on Radio 4." It may help to know that this description is written in a whole variety of fonts and sizes, with intermittent capitalisation. You may also have realised by now that "Pistache" is a simple anagram of "Pastiche." If not, then the back cover explains that it's a combination of pastiche and piss-take. If that gets you rolling on the floor laughing, then this book is for you. As for me, it didn't, and I'm afraid it's not.

Essentially a drawn-out variation on the theme of "What if one author with a distinctive style had written another author's work?" this is the kind of clever humour that knows it's clever, that enjoys being clever, that wants to tell you every other moment just how clever it really is. So we have pieces in the style of Kingsley (and Martin) Amis, D H Lawrence, John Betjeman, Richmal Crompton and many others. And most of them are recognisable, especially since there's a helpful title on each piece, telling you who it's supposed to be. Some are amusing: Dan Brown (always an easy target) visiting the cash dispenser made me wince and smile at the same time; some are clever ("Kubla Khan" rewritten as an account of building a conservatory) and some are... well, you can see what he's getting at, but is "American Psycho" written by Jane Austen really, as the front cover quote from the Sunday Telegraph puts it, "unforgivably witty?"

If your idea of fun is to have a really clever person tell you clever jokes about cleverness, buy this book. Unfortunately I'll have to disagree (yet again) with the Telegraph: "Pistache" as a whole is, I'm afraid, forgivably unwitty.

Weirdest warning ever

2011-01-21T23:22:00.001Z

OK, so this is a picture of the packet of Tesco cotton buds in our bathroom. There are some warnings on the side, saying that plastic bags can be dangerous, etc. There are also some storage instructions. The first one says "Store in a dry place." Fair enough, I suppose. You don't want damp cotton buds. But look closely at the next one.

It says "Keep away from light."

Yes, "Keep away from light."

Maybe I've missed something here, but I really don't understand why Tesco's cotton buds should be kept in the dark, or what might happen to them should they accidentally be bombarded with photons. Short of adding "Do not feed after midnight," it's hard to see how this could get any stranger.

All work and no play (well, panto)

2011-01-20T11:21:00.000Z

The last couple of nights I've woken up worrying about the panto - nothing major going wrong, but I'm very aware that there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that needs to happen, and that it's down to me to make sure it does. Unfortunately at the moment I seem to be pretty bad at prioritising my time, so that I never get past the 'Urgent do it NOW' stuff that keeps the household running, and the 'Important do it soon' stuff gets put off again and again and again...

Today is the second day of the rest of your life

2011-01-19T17:00:00.000Z

It's so easy to make a new start. All you have to do is wake up in the morning and say "Today is going to be different"; meet someone inspiring and think "I want to be just like them"; read a book that changes your life and resolve "I will take the first step"; wake up in the gutter and decide "Never again." Starting a new life is easy. Continuing a new life, now that's hard.

How long does the energy last? How long will shame or ambition motivate you? How do you make that change stick? How long before the gutter calls you back? It could be days or weeks or months or hours, but there has to be a second step after the first, and that can be really tough.

It's inspiring, deciding to change. There's a buzz about it. Fresh from that book or conversation or personal moment of clarity, life seems new, everything is possible. But on the second day, in second week, month, hour, it's not so new any more. Doing the new thing is... getting kind of the same.

If this was a different kind of blog, there'd be a list to follow of the top five points to get through the second day. There'd be helpful links to my ebook "Making Change Stick" (order now and get 25% discount). There'd at least be an inspiring personal story. This is not that kind of blog - sorry about that - so you just get the questions, without the easy resolution. Maybe another day. Or not.

Blogging when tired

2011-01-15T16:44:00.000Z

Was halfway through a blog post while on the bus home but was warm and tired and started to fall asleep; hit the wrong button on my phone and lost the lot. Meh.

There ought to be a word...

2011-01-13T20:01:00.002Z

...for the sensation of only having drunk half a cup of tea or coffee because you got interrupted or distracted. It's not thirst or regret or annoyance; it's a whisper emotion of being almost indefinably half a cup short.

Epiphany

2011-01-06T08:42:00.000Z

Today, 6th January, is the day when we celebrate Epiphany: the visit of the Magi to Jesus. It's also traditionally the day when we take down Christmas decorations. It's the end of Christmastide, and the beginning (depending on your tradition - if you're a Christian) either of Ordinary Time or of the season of Epiphany. It tends, however, to feel much more like an end than a beginning. The Christmas lights are turned off; the baubles put away; the tree goes either back in the attic or to be chopped up for composting. The house feels feels bigger and emptier and somehow much more bare than it did before Christmas. And Ordinary Time (which comes from the same Latin root as "ordinal" - the numbers like first, second, third) feels like just counting off the weeks and, well, ordinary. In some traditions the Christmas crib is left for a while longer, and figures of three kings with gold, frankincense and myrrh are placed next to the infant Jesus. But that's the end of the Christmas story - bar the slaughter of the innocents (which is another story that never seems to make it into children's Bibles).

Why does this feel so much like an ending? In the early years of Christianity, as it spread, it made good sense to co-opt existing festivals. As people who celebrated a mid-winter festival became Christians, it was helpful to be able to say "You already know that in the middle of winter, something amazing happens: the days begin to get longer again. You talk about this using the language of birth, of newness. The Good News is that you're right! What you've been grasping at is the truth, that Jesus was born, and that the midwinter of your sin and shame is melting away." But this was part of a cycle (you just wait until the Spring of Resurrection), whereas now I think that we tend to see our festivals as discrete parcels of time. Never mind that in consumer culture the bulk of the festival happens before the event, rather than after; too many centuries of clocks have made us not very good at thinking of continuous time. We forget that the events we celebrate: births and birthdays, achievements, victories and memorials, are milestones, not destinations. They mark where we are on a journey; they're not an end in themselves, which we then reluctantly abandon to move on to the next distant target.

So I hope that Epiphany, for you and for me, is not the start of something, but the continuation of something. The Magi brought gifts which referred to Jesus' adult roles as king, priest and sacrifice. They were, in fact, for life, not just for Christmas. I hope your Christmas has been good. But I also hope that it is the kind which leads to many days of Ordinary goodness.

Exciting

2011-01-05T09:19:00.004Z

I'm writing this on the bus to work (Marks and Spencer have given me another contract - until March) because I've just posted a Facebook status about being happy to be alive and I wanted to elaborate on that a bit. It may be to with having followed a link that a friend sent me about jobs for writers, and thinking of maybe sending off a CV, but I think that that sort of optimism is another symptom, just like sitting on the bus feeling happynervous at the thought of experiencing 5th January 2011 for the first and only time.

Yesterday I was thinking about dipping one's toe into life, rather than diving in and becoming submerged, and thinking that I have to get fully immersed, fully alive, as a matter of urgency. It occurs to me that a good description of how I feel this morning would be the sensation of standing on the edge of the pool, having decided to jump - that delicious mix of agency and dread: this may not be entirely wise, safe and comfortable, but it is deliberate - and it might even be fun.

Pantomime season (Oh yes it is!)

2010-12-13T10:07:00.000Z

We had the first read-through yesterday for the Bursledon Player's next production - Sinbad the Sailor and Mystery Island. Just about the right amount of young people turned up - not so many that it would have meant turning people down (or having an enormous chorus), but not too few, so I'm not going to have to ring round last year's cast who didn't come back yesterday and plead with them. This year I'm co-writing it with Rachel again; she does the jokes and I do the plot - except for the sections where she does the jokes and the plot and I just write it down.

I have to say I do like writing pantomime - I can have lots of fun finding different ways to use the traditional characters, and I just love the feeling when I think of a line that seems like it doesn't add much, but is going to be a serious bit of plot three scenes later.

Now I need to get it finished and off to the actors asap, so that they can start learning their lines. Maybe next year I'll have more than Act 1 written before auditions. Maybe.

A baby in a stable

2010-12-09T14:01:00.000Z

Last Sunday Peter gave a talk based on John the Baptist's preaching in Matthew. He asked how we can preach the gospel, using an example of some 19th century ideas about hell and damnation - rescuing people who are "hanging over the edge of the pit". We were asked to think about whether or not that kind of language (or those kind of ideas) are right today - what would John the Baptist be saying now?

I've been thinking about this, and though I don't claim to have any well-worked out answers (and certainly not final or authoritative ones!) I can't help coming back to my previous thoughts about who church is for. Is it for people who don't necessarily feel they need to be there, but like the company or think they should show their face once in a while? Or is it for people who know they need something, but don't necessarily think that they'll find it in church? I know there are lots of other kinds of people between these two extremes, but my feeling is that the church in general has quite a lot of the former and not enough of the latter.

I'd really like to see the church being a first resort for anyone who is lonely, desperate, unhappy, friendless, addicted, ashamed or bewildered. But I don't believe that those people will seek out Jesus (especially not in the church) as long as they are lectured or talked down to by people inside the church. I don't think that they will come - even if they are invited - if the church is seen as a group of people who think they know best, telling the rest of the world just how wrong they are.

I think that the church has something of an image problem. Strangely, I believe that the wider culture is actually helping with this. Church is increasingly being seen as a refuge for the intellectually incompetent, the social misfits, the bizarre fringes of the human race. And that's a good thing. I think that we as a worshipping community should identify strongly with that. We are not the people who have got it all together. We are not the best of the best, or even the middle of the average. We are the people who are beginning to grasp just how massively we've messed up. But we come together on a Sunday morning (or a weekday evening) because we have found a hope, an answer, a love that will never give up on us - and we'd love everyone else to find it too.

Of course, as a church we don't have to do that. Nobody says we have to admit our failings in public. We can stand proud, knowing that not only are we children of God (true) but that he has revealed himself to us (also true). We can let everyone know that they need to be saved (this, I think, is referred to as "speaking the truth in love"), and then we can shut the doors of the church and sing our groovy up-to-date worship songs, with a request that the last member left will please turn out the lights. We can, in short, give the world the church it expects.

Should we? I can't say for sure, but in a couple of weeks time I'm going to be celebrating the birth of the Son of God, and he wasn't born anywhere that people expected. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords was born in a stable. We could do worse than think about what that means for us.

It's my birthday

2010-12-07T10:30:00.002Z

Got up this morning to presents and cards on the dining room table and birthday greetings from my family. Today I am 44. It's difficult not to feel old sometimes - after all, I've only ever been younger than I am now, so comparisons are bound to be unfavourable - but it did occur to me that 44 is exactly halfway between 22, when I was recently married and had just started a family and a career, and 66, when I shall be able to retire. I think I shall describe myself not as old, or even middle-aged, but as having both experience and potential.

Lies

2010-12-06T16:50:00.000Z

I hate lies. They make me angry and unhappy.

Maybe I should stop telling them.

Facebook: just when you thought it couldn't get worse...

2010-12-06T08:47:00.000Z

Yesterday I posted about the proliferation of cartoon pictures on Facebook. Today when I logged on I saw this:

!!ATTENTION: the group asking everyone to change their profile picture to their favourite cartoon character is actually a group of paedophiles. They doing it because kid's will accept their friend request faster if they see a cartoon picture. It has nothing to do with supporting child ...violence, ITS ON TONIGHT'S NEWS copy and paste this to your status! Let every one know !!

I probably should have guessed that someone would scream the p-word at some point. And the problem with a warning about paedophiles is that you must MUST MUST!!! pass it on. Except that this looks like nonsense to me. Let's see... there are multiple punctuation mistakes. There are capital letters to call attention to the REALLY IMPORTANT part - which is not about the group of paedophiles, it's about "tonight's news". Oh well, if it's on tonight's news, it must be real, right? But what news? Where? If this is so important that it needs exclamation marks at the beginning, why not include a link to the news item?

But most nonsensical of all is this: if a group of paedophiles believe that children will accept a friend request faster (by which I assume they mean "are more likely to accept a friend request" - surely the speed with which they accept is immaterial), then it is to that group's benefit to be the only ones with cartoon profile pictures. If everyone has a cartoon picture, then any advantage those cunning paedophiles might have had will be lost. It would be utterly self-defeating.

The genius of this is that if I didn't change my picture to a cartoon I was clearly in favour of violence against children, but now if I do I could easily be one of those devious paedophiles.

Change your facebook profile picture to your favourite cartoon character

2010-12-05T17:52:00.001Z

A couple of days ago some of my friends on Facebook had this as their status: "Change your Facebook profile picture to your favourite cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday December 6 there should be no human faces on Facebook, but an invasion of memories. This is to support no violence towards children." Yesterday, it had changed to "Change your Facebook profile picture to a cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same, for the NSPCC. Until Monday (December 6th), there should be no human faces on Facebook, but an invasion of memories. This is a campaign to stop violence against children." The NSPCC Facebook page says "A warm welcome to all our cartoon friends! We are incredibly grateful for your support to end cruelty to children in the UK. Although the NSPCC did not originate the childhood cartoon Facebook campaign, we welcome the attention it has brought to the work we do. If you would like to find out more about how you can get involved, please visit our website."

I haven't changed my Facebook picture to my favourite cartoon character. This isn't because I don't support the work of the NSPCC or the other organisations working to reduce the incidence of cruelty to children. It isn't because I'm a heartless git who is happy for children to suffer. And it isn't because I just can't think of what my favourite cartoon character would be. It's because putting a cartoon picture on Facebook WILL NOT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE.

Never mind that some well-meaning soul decided that this "campaign" was from the NSPCC, though I admire their positive response. This will do nothing to stop people being violent to children. Nobody who regularly beats their children because they themselves were beaten as a child, nobody who sometimes whacks their unruly toddler round the back of the head because they don't have many parenting skills, nobody who is addicted to alcohol or drugs and sometimes doesn't feed their children - and certainly none of the tiny tiny minority who set out deliberately to be cruel to children - will change their behaviour one little bit because there are suddenly pictures of Pikachu and Bagpuss all over Facebook.

If you want to reduce violence to children, give money to the NSPCC. Or get off Facebook and volunteer.

The politics of snow clearance

2010-12-03T16:31:00.001Z

I've just moved our car out of the estate and round to Tesco's car park, from where I will hopefully be able to move it later when Peter needs a lift down to Hamble. It took some initial work with the shovel to get it out of our road (and then again going up the hill), but as I drove along there were small groups of people (mostly men) who were clearing sections of the road. People were getting together - not just clearing their own driveways, but getting the public road clear. And when cars got stuck, two or three people would give them a push.

So is this a failure of local government? Although a lot of people live on our estate, the council don't grit the only road around it that everyone uses. Should we expect our local council to repay us for our taxes by getting the roads clearer, faster, in winter? Or is this The Big Society? People getting together, untrammelled by prescriptive regulation, to really sort out what needs to be done?

I suspect it's not really either of these alternatives. Local and national government are repeatedly unable to deal with extreme events like a couple of inches of snow, and perhaps should be better prepared and respond faster. On the other hand, they can't be everywhere and do everything. And I don't think that people get together because they are feeling empowered by Dave's big idea. I think that generally people tend to look out for each other, and they don't think it's an unusual thing to clear a bit of road - particularly if that means another driver is less likely to slide into your parked car.

I guess we get the the government that we pay for (and nobody wants to pay any more tax); but please don't politicise human goodwill and pretend you've brought about social change.

Real life

2010-12-02T13:58:00.000Z

For the last week I've been meaning to post something about how astonishingly busy I've been. I expect it would have been a lighthearted look at how many different things I'd been involved with, with a serious undercurrent to make the reader think "Hey, this guy really is incredibly busy."

Unfortunately I haven't. And the not very lighthearted reason is that I've been busy, tired, and procrastinating. When I used to be employed full time - especially in the months before the NHS and I parted company - I imagined what life would be like when I was having to do all kinds of things to try and raise money/get people off our backs about debts. In my imagination I would get up early, work hard all day, and then when evening came and my loving wife and family beckoned me to come sit with them and maybe watch a movie, I'd ruefully but resolutely smile and explain that no, I had some more work to do.

Reality (as is often the case) is somewhat different. Yes, I do get up early. Yes, I try and work hard to get some money. But I don't work hard enough or for long enough to get sufficient money to stop the graph on the household budget looking like the advanced slopes at St Moritz. Because in real life there are lots of other things that need doing, where a smiling refusal doesn't make any difference. And come the evening, frankly I'm so exhausted that I've hit the settee before you can say "Why don't you come and sit down?"

Part of wanting to be a writer is the discipline of writing when I don't want to, or when I'm tired, or when there's too much else on. This blog ought to have daily entries, except in extremely unusual circumstances. Right now, I need to get my act together.

Best White Stripes cover EVER

2010-11-18T07:36:00.000Z

Joy

2010-11-16T07:52:00.000Z

I got too little sleep last night; I've recently both been bereaved and become unemployed; the car has broken down and I don't have enough money to repair it, and yet when I was walking up to Tesco in the freezing cold this morning because we had no bread, I was so happy I felt like singing.

Recently I've been waking up in the morning feeling happy, with an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness for all the good things I have. I am amazingly blessed. And more than that, I have an incredible source of joy, deep down inside me, that is far better than any transient feelings of happiness.

For anyone who says "I want some of whatever he's on," I'm afraid that you might not like the answer, because corny as it sounds in this superficial and cynical age, I'm fairly sure that this is down to Jesus. My joy is linked to knowing that I am loved, with an overwhelming, unbelievable, astonishing, world-saving, death-conquering love, and that nothing, not unemployment or bereavement or malfunctioning Renaults or cold morning walks to Tesco can ever separate me from that love.

Serious journalism

2010-11-12T10:50:00.000Z

I was recently asked by the editor of Earth Times to do a piece for them. They'd found me through The Freelance Journalist Directory - which just goes to show that it's worth getting your name listed online! Anyway, the piece (hopefully the first of many) is here.

Things Dads Do number 1847

2010-11-11T13:22:00.000Z

Sticking suede pads on the ends of their daughter's pointe shoes.

My mum died

2010-11-10T16:05:00.000Z

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that I haven't posted anything on here for a couple of weeks. My mum died suddenly and unexpectedly on Thursday 21^st October. I didn't want to write about it, not for a while – but I didn't want to write about anything else either. So the last couple of weeks have been a succession of ideas where I thought “I must write that down,” followed by “but I don't want to write anything until I've written about mum dying.”

I had a phone call from my dad on the Thursday afternoon. I'd known my mum wasn't well – my sister said she'd been diagnosed with COPD, which was odd considering that she'd never smoked or worked in factories – and the last time I spoke to her she was obviously short of breath. I'd decided that I'd try to get to see her sometime soon, maybe before Christmas. My dad didn't say much, other than that the ambulance paramedics had done what they could, but her heart had stopped and she was dead. I phoned my sister and my brother, and made arrangements to travel up to Northamptonshire. I arrived too late that night to do anything much, so had to wait until the next day to go to the mortuary.

I went with my dad up to the hospital, but he didn't want to go into the little room where my mum's body was, so I went in alone. Before I went in, I had rehearsed some of the things I wanted to say to her. They were mostly apologies for one thing or another. I went in, and there was someone who looked like my mum, but was much too still. I started to talk to her, and realised that I didn't need to say sorry at all. She had loved me – I know that for certain – and I didn't need to apologise for not being the person I imagined she wanted me to be. I've not got everything right, and some things I've got wrong, and some things I've done kind of OK but they weren't really what anyone expected. But that didn't matter. She had loved me as I am, not as who she thought I could or should be. I'm sure I must have frustrated or disappointed her sometimes – what child doesn't – but when it came down to it, it didn't seem to be important. I discovered that what I wanted to say to her was “Thank you.” Thank you for that constant, quiet love. Thank you for being there. Thank you for being forever busy keeping things clean and getting the dinner ready and making tea and reminding me tactfully that my brother's birthday was next week, I hadn't forgotten had I? “Thank you,” I wanted to say, “thank you for just getting on and doing what you did best in the whole world, which was being my mum.”

The funeral was last Friday and I have to say that it was a good day. It sounds odd to say it and when I've said that to people in the last few days they've all said something like “Well, as good as these things can be” – but it was genuinely a special day to remember her. Of course I miss her, but the point is that I know that she's not dead, not in any final sense. On the contrary, as a Christian I believe that my mum is in some way now more truly alive, that she has left behind a world where there is sin and shame and pain and death, and is called to live in a world without any of those things, where she will be truly herself, created to live joyfully as an image of God. Of course I will be sad when there's no phone call from her on family birthdays, but how can I not also be happy when I know that she has no pain, that she is called to be with the God she served faithfully, that one day I will join her, caught up in a love that is higher and wider and deeper and stronger than anything we can know or imagine, stronger even than death itself.

Crazy Special Offer! (More Tesco madness)

2010-10-21T17:21:00.000+01:00

Can anyone explain to me how, unless you want three jars of Oregano, 3 for £1.60 is a good offer?

Consumerist Christmas

2010-10-21T17:15:00.000+01:00

I went up to Tesco yesterday and in the reduced section there was a huge stack of cut-price mince pies. Now I know that mince pies (unlike hot cross buns) are a year-round food, but they are associated with Christmas, and indeed Mr Kipling, the manufacturer, has thoughtfully put a design on the box that features a gas lamp, snowy fir trees and a cottage with lighted windows. They've even adapted their trademark "exceedingly fine" phrase, and called them "exceedingly merry" mince pies. I don't think that it's unreasonable to infer that these are mince pies that are particularly designed to be bought for Christmas. "Just the thing," you may think as you buy your seasonal provisions, "some mince pies in an attractive Christmassy box." So why, in the name of heaven, do these mince pies have a best before date of 20th October? They're a food associated with Christmas in a Christmas-themed package and they are going to go off a whole one sixth of a year before Christmas even starts!

I know that retailers make a lot of money from Christmas (though I have my own opinions about that) and I understand that they want to start selling Christmas-themed goods as early as possible to maximise profits, but it just seems bizarre to sell things in Christmas packaging that won't even make it into November.

When the Internet is great (and when it isn't)

2010-10-19T11:11:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I exercised my prerogative as a citizen who needed advice and went to the Citizens' Advice Bureau. (I note, by the way, that I've been a grammar pedant and put an apostrophe in their name, whereas they don't.) I'd been on their site to find the location of the nearest branch, but I hadn't clicked on any of the links there, because I wanted to talk to someone face to face and get an informed opinion. I'm a great believer in the internet as a source of useful information, and in education to help people sort out the information from the misinformation and the opinion dressed up as fact, but I actually wanted someone else to give me advice.

So off I went. I'd remembered the location from the website, and it was a straightforward walk - until I got to where I thought the CAB should be, and discovered it wasn't there. No worries. Thanks to the wonders of GPS, Google Maps on my phone showed me where I was - which turned out to be exactly where Google said the CAB should be. I wandered up and down a couple of side streets and eventually asked a couple who were getting into their car. They told me I needed to walk another 100 metres down the road - and when I did, going way past where Google said I should go, there was the CAB.

After a wait, I was seen by a pleasant and enthusiastic member of their team, who listened to me, and then gave me a few leaflets but told me that my main source of information would be their online advice guide. He couldn't really give me advice, he explained, because there were too many variables. What I really needed to do was get information online, so that I could make up my own mind, and then go back to talk to them again if I needed further help.

So there you are. The advice bureau advised that I should go to the internet for information. The internet is great for telling me that there's a CAB within walking distance, but not so good for finding it exactly. I suspect that the Advice Guide will give me a similar level of macro information, but I'll still need individual guidance on how to apply it to me.

There's a point at which information available to everyone becomes information that is of decreasing use to any one individual. Current iterations of the internet are moving towards personally useful information for everyone, pushing ever further away the point at which "widely available" becomes "personally inapplicable", but my feeling is that there's still some distance to go.

Thingy Whatsit and the Doodahs

2010-10-17T17:52:00.000+01:00

I had a brief conversation last weekend about how bands aren't called "First-Name Second-Name and the Somethings" any more, and since then I've had occasional "Yes!" moments when I've thought of another. I suspect I might have alarmed the person who was walking down Shirley High Street as I was cycling up when I suddenly shouted "Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers." I had fairly strict rules for myself about this - it has to be two names, followed by "and the" and a noun. So Martha Reeves and The Vandellas was allowed, but not Martha and The Vandellas (or Antony and The Johnsons). It didn't have to be an actual name, and I allowed more than one word after the "and the" - I could have Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars or Bobby "Boris" Pickett and The Crypt Kickers. Both of those, by the way, I considered for a subcategory of "really long names in the format name-name-and-the-noun".

I suspect I've had about as much mileage as I can from this. We need more bands with names in this format - except that unless you're starting a kitsch tribute band, having a name like that is going to make you sound as dated as Brian Poole and The Tremeloes.

Online/offline balance

2010-10-17T07:30:00.001+01:00

The problem with having a busy and productive day is that that doesn't necessarily include time spent sitting blogging or updating Facebook. So if I'm having a really boring time, I have lots of opportunities to tell the world about it, but if I'm doing anything that makes me think "I'd like to tell the world about this" I'm too busy to do so. So I had quite a good day yesterday, felt quite happy because of some news that I will write about another time, wished my eldest son a happy 20th birthday (I've been a parent for twenty years. Twenty years!), just generally got things done. And the only time I spent online was ordering books from Amazon that children need for college. And now I've run out of time to write anything insightful because we have to get ready to get Rachel to Fleet, where she's doing her Modern Trio at the Tudor Rose Festival.

Congratulations Western Michigan University

2010-10-15T12:30:00.005+01:00

You have made my day.

For anyone who hasn't found this site (I got there via Reddit); go to the home page and then press z+v on your keyboard.

Edit 17th Oct: Western Michigan clearly got wise to the number of people accessing their site and removed what I assume was a student joke. If you missed it, pressing z+v changed the central panel to say "Zombies. Classes cancelled. If infected stay home."

Good while it lasted.

Being ill does not guarantee more time

2010-10-15T09:47:00.001+01:00

Having spent the last couple of days with stomach cramps (still in evidence) and vomiting (hopefully resolved), I've noticed how often I tend to think that because I'm ill I could get more things done. There's a train of thought that goes "I am ill, therefore I will get fewer things done. I am doing fewer things, therefore I will have more time. I will have more time, therefore I will be able to get more things done."

Now you know this is mad, and I know this is mad, but it doesn't stop it from rattling round on a loop in my head; I decide that since I'm not at work I'll use the time at home to catch up on work; I'll get all the jobs done around the house that I've not managed to do when I'm healthy; I'll write more and blog more and be artistic and creative and...

Of course what happens is that I look at all the things I want to do, and think to myself, "Actually, I don't feel very well."

[Redacted]

2010-10-12T14:58:00.000+01:00

I have just been asked by my employer (who shall not be named) to remove my last blog post, as it mentioned my employer in connection with my dissatisfaction with my job. I might be leaving this employment sooner than I'd planned!

Genuinely, this is what I can see right now

2010-10-11T20:23:00.000+01:00

I think that it probably says everything you need to know about our household that on the computer desk there is a (non-functioning) laptop balanced on top of the printer, and on top of that there is a D&D miniatures Rock Titan. Someone has put a pair of safety scissors in the Rock Titan's hand and balanced a cute toy puppy on its head.

Honestly, this is how I live.

Click below to see the pic.

On being adored

2010-10-09T19:23:00.000+01:00

There's a lot to be said for being adored. In Moulin Rouge Ewan McGregor sings, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return", but there's a very special feeling that comes from knowing that someone, somewhere, thinks the world of you. Someone has a photo of you placed so that you are always in the corner of their eye. Someone checks your Facebook page several times a day, and when there's nothing new to see, looks through all the pictures that they've already seen a thousand times. Someone wonders what you think, imagines what you might say, constructs variations on variations on an imaginary conversation with you about the nothing-very-much most important things in the world.

Of course it won't last. It's not love. But it is, right now, just wonderful.

I have been robbed

2010-10-08T22:19:00.005+01:00

Rather annoyingly, I had several emails today from PayPal, the last one of which said they they had limited access to my account while they made further checks. It turns out that someone calling themselves Arthur Waller has somehow taken two payments out of my current account via PayPal, the first for $163 and the second for £178. It's not fun being stolen from - oddly enough, being a Christian, it's not hard to forgive "Arthur Waller", but it's difficult to see how we'll make it through to the end of the month if we don't get our money back pretty promptly. Do I believe that living as a Christian means forgiving people? Yes, certainly. Do I genuinely believe that God will help us get by with a lot less money than we'd planned on having? Erm...

Update 00:40: just got an email from PayPal to say that the investigation has completed and the funds will be returned to my account within five working days.

Some things come back to haunt you

2010-10-08T11:07:00.005+01:00

The recent rain and wind have removed several layers of advertising from this billboard and revealed a Tory election poster. Unfortunately for David "I'm sorry that wasn't in the manifesto" Cameron, the promises he made are still out there. Let's hope he sticks to them better than these posters did.

ICU baby (shakin' that ass)

2010-10-07T22:57:00.003+01:00

Not convinced

2010-10-07T22:20:00.002+01:00

I've made some changes to the look of the blog - mostly by starting off with one of Blogger's templates and then trying to fine-tune it. To be honest,I think it's going to need a lot more work. I'm tempted to go back to my old layout, but (a) I actually want a fresh start, and (b) my old template seems to have vanished.

Hello again

2010-10-05T22:53:00.002+01:00

One of the (several) things that I was going to do today but didn't get around to was giving this blog a bit of a makeover in preparation for starting a more regular posting schedule again. Unfortunately, as so often happens, life got in the way (in this case, my phone started playing up - freezing, saying I had texts but not displaying them, etc.) so I've spent the time that was earmarked for blog renovation trying to avoid doing a hard reset and then doing it anyway. But I decided that I'd get a quick post on here anyway, even if it's only this.

I hate weekends

2010-05-14T18:00:00.000+01:00

It's the feeling of walking in the front door on Friday evening, tired, not wanting to do anything, and looking at the prospect of two days of cleaning and cooking and washing and transporting children and shopping and DIY and church and getting to Sunday evening feeling just as tired with the inevitability of Monday to come. If lack of achievement is measured in things that should be done but are not, in broken promises and unfulfilled resolutions, then the weekend is Failure Central.

You know things are bad...

2010-05-05T14:58:00.000+01:00

when you sit at work Googling 'burnout' instead of working

Welcome to multicultural Southampton

2010-04-26T12:44:00.001+01:00

I get by with a little help...

2010-04-21T18:41:00.003+01:00

I have been having a bit of an emotionally up and down time recently, and there are some habits and personal issues in particular that I think that it would be helpful for me to write about. I don't want to keep a journal, but I have thought several times about starting a blog. "But," I hear you cry, "you already have a blog - you're writing it now!" Yes indeed, but here's the thing: I know that only a few people read this blog, and most of them are accidental visitors via search engines, but I think that a couple of people who know me read this occasionally, and I wouldn't want to tell them any of the stuff that's on my mind. In other words, if I genuinely feel that I have some emotional stuff to talk about, friends and family would be the last people I would want to share it with. I'm sure this isn't uncommon: there would be fewer therapists if everyone talked to their friends and family. Nevertheless, it struck me that the people that I think of as ~~closer than strangers~~ friends would be the people to whom I would be most wary of telling the truth about myself.

Mickey 3D "Matador"

2009-11-30T11:13:00.001Z

I've liked this song for ages but I've never seen the video before today. Enjoy!

Aphorism of the day

2009-10-16T18:01:00.000+01:00

If there was a song called "Life is worth living" it would sound trite, because that's the reason all songs are sung

Time management

2009-10-15T17:19:00.002+01:00

I was going to write a post about how I need to be more focussed to get done everything I want to do, but then I got distracted doing other stuff...

I've been looking at ideas for writing more quickly. One of the common suggestions is "Don't edit while you write"; I do this consistently, mainly because I have to look at my fingers while I type. As soon as I look up at the screen I start correcting words and phrases. But the main thing I need to address is my ability suddenly to be fascinated by everything except the task at hand. I can understand this at work, where nothing I have to do holds any interest for me, but it's ridiculous that I should want to sit down and do something, them as soon as I have done, I'd rather do something much more dull instead.

Hmmm. This may be more of an insight into my psyche than I'd intended...

Belle à en crever

2009-10-09T19:11:00.001+01:00

My favourite French singer!

Coarse phishing

2009-10-08T12:46:00.002+01:00

This is probably the worst phishing email I've ever seen.

It's difficult to pick a favourite aspect of this. Not knowing the bank is called Alliance and Leicester is good, as is Aeicester. I think that I'd probably go for the close proximity of the words "veifry" and "verication".

Writing

2009-10-08T10:08:00.002+01:00

One of the common pieces of advice for anyone wanting to break into freelance writing is to get their own web page. Of course, I have this lovely blog, but I'm not convinced that anyone who comes here looking for a writer will hire me (unless it's from Infrequent Rants magazine), so there is, as of today, a new little link in the sidebar to the right of your screen. Hurrah!

In related news, I'm going to give Constant Content a try. It looks as though I can post articles on there that I've written for other sites, and that people may then pay me a nominal amount for usage rights. Putting original stuff on there would mean I could sell exclusive rights as well, but I'm happier at the moment with an egg-basket diversification strategy.

Education for atheists

2009-10-05T14:59:00.001+01:00

One of the atheist arguments against bringing up your children in any kind of faith is that it's abusive, forcing children to accept fairy stories (like the Bible) as fact, before their minds can learn to think critically. I've always had a couple of reservations about this, not least that I think it's better for the parent-child relationship if parents are truthful, as far as possible, and congruent: that what they think, do, say and believe should all fit together. It's bad for children if parents say "I really love you" and then punch them: obviously punching them is bad for them, but longer-lasting harm is done by the lack of congruence: how does that child learn to trust someone else who says "I love you"? So no matter whether or not you think that telling children about God is a terrible thing to do, I'm sure that believing in God but not telling your children about him will cause harm to a child. What will a child make of an adult who lives their life by certain rules but doesn't talk about them - or talks about them as if they are matters of little consequence? Besides which, if we shouldn't talk to children about religion before they have learned to think critically, should we talk to them about rational humanism? Do we teach them to think before we give them anything to think about?

As an aside, I'm always a little perturbed by the use of words like "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" which get applied to how believers bring up their children. I have to say that if we were seriously carrying out the kind of mind-control techniques that the caricature Christian is supposed to do, we'd be a bit better at it. Thousands and thousands of young people leave the church every year. Either our brainwashing is, frankly, a bit rubbish, or (shock!) they haven't been brainwashed at all, just brought up by their parents and chosen (like millions of other young people) to seek out alternatives. Of course, as a Christian, I strongly believe that one of the things the church should do with teenagers is to teach them to think for themselves, to ask hard questions and to be dissatisfied with facile answers. That way there is a chance that they won't get to 18 and suddenly discover that a simple Sunday-school faith doesn't really help to make sense of a complex adult world.

Anyway, this post was sparked by a piece on the Theos site, with research that suggests that converts to atheism appear to be less well-educated than converts to theism. If true, this would seem to run counter to the New Atheist proposition that if only everyone learned to think for themselves, religion would die out. In fact, it seems that if you come out of school with few or no qualifications, you may stop believing in God, but if you go to university and can write a dissertation, you may start believing in God, even if you weren't ~~indoctrinated~~ brought up that way.

Armageddon, popularity of

2009-10-02T20:08:00.002+01:00

Don't ask me why, but I was looking on Google Trends and I did a search for "Armageddon". I'd love to know the reason for this: there's a spike in searches for Armageddon just before the end of every year. It's not right at the end of the year, when people might change the calendar and be reminded of the eventual end of time, and it doesn't seem to bear much relation to related news stories.

The sermon for Advent Sunday usually looks forward not only to the coming of Christ at Christmas, but also to his coming again. Either the eschaton is being preached so widely during Advent that lots of people are going home and using Google to find out what to expect (it is, after all, easier to understand than Revelation), or the Church's traditional seasonal liturgy fits with the zeitgeist rather better than I might have expected.

Engaging with "new atheism"

2009-10-02T11:34:00.002+01:00

I'm interested in how we as Christians can engage with the kind of anti-Christian, pro-rationalism outlook that gets referred to as "new atheism". I think that the study of apologetics should be a top priority for Christians, so that we can explain our beliefs as we should. Today I found a superb example of this. In Australia there is a campaign called Jesus - All About Life. The campaign didn't buy the .com version of their website, only the .com.au one, and now there is an atheist rebuttal site on jesusallaboutlife.com. However, it's there, on this post, that there's a wonderful discussion in the comments. The Christian commenter, John Bartik, whose strangely-named website is here, is patient, tenacious and knowledgable. I think he does a great job of ignoring all the bits of the other commenter's argument that are repetitive or recycled Dawkinisms, which would make me throw up my hands in dismay or chew my own arm off in frustration, and focuses on areas for taking the conversation forward. This is what being a Christian should look like!

Finally, an idea I wanted to write down

2009-09-30T06:48:00.002+01:00

Actually, the title of this post is a little misleading. I've had lots of ideas that I wanted to write down, but I finally had a thought that I needed to get down before I lost it, but yet was something that I wanted to share with you, my reader.

The alarm went off at 6.00 this morning but I lay back down on the bed again to wait for the second (6.30) alarm. I was lying there in an almost awake kind of state, and a series of thoughts came to me. This has a lot to do with things I've been thinking about and reading around for a while, so it may be that my brain had finally built a connection while I was asleep. Whatever, the first thought was about how in marketing there is a need to make a new product seem popular, to create a buzz around it, because people (with some exceptions) are not keen to pay for something that nobody else is doing. We're generally herd animals - we follow the pack. Which, evolutionarily speaking, is pretty sensible.

Then I was thinking about evangelism, and about how to get people to come to Christ, or at least to come to church (in whatever form) so that they can hear about Jesus and make a decision about what they'd like to do with their lives. I wondered how much the Church suffers because everyone knows that hardly anyone goes to church, so church is clearly a place where you wouldn't want to go. I was thinking about how to create a buzz around church, and whether we do that, and how much we sell Jesus as something that the world really NEEDS.

This drifted into a thought about permission marketing. To put it very crudely, traditional marketing says "Buy our product. It's great, and it will improve your life." Permission marketing says "I've got a product that I believe in. These are the reasons it can improve your life. What do you think?" (If anyone who reads this knows more about marketing and I've got this totally wrong, please let me know.) Anyway, I was wondering about whether the church uses traditional or permission marketing - which I guess would be the difference between "Believe in Jesus or you'll go to Hell" and "See what a difference Jesus has made to me. Would you like to know more?" The second one is much more difficult to do (at least for me - though I don't do the first one either).

Then I came back to the idea of making Jesus popular, and creating a buzz around church, so that people could pick up on the excitement of being a Christian. I think that I was drifting back off to sleep at this point, because this is where the metaphorical light bulb popped up above my head. I suspect that I was working out the target demographic for an ad for church, and thinking of something that basically said "Church is for people like YOU" where "you" are 25-40, employed, in a marriage or long-term relationship, probably going to have or already bringing up children. Then I realised that it's hard to create a buzz for people like that, because so many other advertisers are already telling them lots of other stuff that they need which doesn't involve getting up on Sunday mornings, never mind devoting their lives to the service of the Gospel, so I was a bit disappointed. Then I had a worrying thought. I thought that if we created a buzz about church, but that young successful people didn't get it, then we'd end up with a church full of misfits and losers. We'd have a congregation full of old people and physically ugly people and not very bright people and unemployed people and alcoholics and drug users and people who could do with having a bath a little more often. At this point the light went on, because of course that's who should be filling the church. To quote what's rapidly becoming one of my favourite phrases, Jesus is for losers.

And then the light bulb got really bright, because I was thinking about how uncomfortable I'd be going to church with a load of loser type people (sorry, being honest here), and I realised that that's because I wasn't actually acknowledging what a loser I am. In Christian language, of course, we don't say "loser", we say "sinner", but it came down to the same thing. I wasn't comfortable because I was thinking of myself as somehow better than some other kinds of people, and the fact is that I'm not. I'm only allowed to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God because of what Jesus has done. I certainly don't deserve to be one. And that's the counterintuitive message of the church. We're here for the people whom we probably wouldn't chose as friends. The unreliable ones. The smelly ones. The ones who drink too much and swear too much and don't bring up their children very well. The losers and the users. In short, people like us. Bad, sad, mad and damaged people, like you and like me.

And that's why I feel uncomfortable with Christian websites that are full of young attractive people and don't have sad lonely losers with rubbish hair. That's why I'm not sure about asking people permission to pray for them. That's why I think that we can be bold about preaching the Gospel, because we know that it's not going to make us look stupider than we already are, because we're humble: we know that the winners in the Kingdom are the losers in this world. We can get churches full of the kind of people that Jesus came to call. Not the well, but the sick. Like us.

Giving up Twitter

2009-07-06T15:16:00.004+01:00

I have decided to give up Twitter. Having adopted it when it was just emerging into general public awareness, I'm now abandoning it just as it seems to be really taking off. There are several reasons for this, which I'll go into in a minute, but first a couple of caveats. This is not in itself a criticism of Twitter: of course it has its faults and shortcomings, but they are not the reason for me to abandon it. Nor is it a criticism of other social networks, the way they are used, or the people who use them. I know several people who are enthusiastic and prolific users of Twitter and Facebook: this is not in any way intended to be a commentary on them or the way they use social networks. This is an entirely subjective point of view and a completely personal decision.

OK, so why give up Twitter?

I have recently had extended periods of not using it, first as a discipline during Lent, and lately I have deliberately not posted (though have read tweets from other people), because I was ambivalent about whether I wanted to post some things. I decided not to post anything and see how that went. The result was that I became more convinced that I could easily manage without Twitter. Of course, millions of people manage without all sorts of things that we take for granted, so I needed some reason why not using Twitter would actually benefit me. At the very least, I wanted to be sure that using Twitter wasn't adding any positive benefits to my life, in which case giving it up would save time that could be used on something more productive.

I'd been ambivalent about tweeting some things (and therefore posting them on Facebook, since that was set up to happen automatically) because ideas, impressions and feelings that were important to me at the time were not necessarily things that I would want to share with a wide group of acquaintances. This meant that I was tending to self-censor things that were genuinely important to me, and was left with my daily trivia and minutiae: what I was eating, where I was going, whether or not I had lost any weight. This is a caricature of Twitter: frequent and regular updates about nothing at all. Did I really want to be broadcasting this stuff? I know there are a few people who like to know what's going on with me, but I'm pretty sure that they don't need every detail - and I have a Facebook account to which I can post as easily as I can tweet, so I wouldn't be cutting off anyone who genuinely wanted to find out what I was doing. As for everyone else, I have to be honest and say that I'm not that fascinating.

Similarly, although I am interested in what my friends are doing, I found that looking at a Twitter stream was becoming more an exercise in skipping through tweets than actually finding anything; Twitter had become a way of using up time, or a distraction when I was putting off dull tasks. I regularly found that I would check Twitter on my phone and feel that I had neither gained anything nor added anything useful. It was not, to use a marketspeak phrase, "adding value". If the time I spent reading tweets could be spent doing something that does add value, or that at least doesn't leave me feeling like I had just wasted time, then wouldn't it make sense to give it up?

Most of the people that I follow I do not know and am unlikely to meet in real life. It's always fascinating to get an insight into someone else's life (which is why so much TV is essentially "look at what these other people are doing") but if I didn't know about what these people are doing it wouldn't actually change my life. Similarly, the organisations I follow have so rarely told me anything that has made a difference to me that losing their tweets would have a negligible impact. If someone starts following me on Twitter, I check their Twitter page, and if it looks like they say things I'd be interested in then I'll follow them. Almost nobody who has started to follow me (and why would you want to, if you don't know me?) has got a follow back from me. I'm sure there's an argument that following someone back is the kind of reciprocal behaviour that makes the digital world go round a little more smoothly, but I simply don't want to know dull details about strangers. Sorry.

Online social networking is an adjunct to real life social networking, not a replacement for it. Having 50, or 500, or 5000 followers on Twitter doesn't make up for having few real friends. Having a few good friends with whom you can talk and share confidences, and a wider circle of friends that you can socialise and have fun with, plus 500 Twitter followers is significantly different from feeling isolated from people and using online networks as a way of masking loneliness. For me, it makes more sense to try and develop closer relationships with people I care about than to have a long list of people who tell me things that don't have any emotional impact at all.

I actively dislike the competitive element of numbers of followers, or indeed the value that is put on having many followers. You don't need to be Ashton Kutcher to be seduced into thinking that 10,000 followers is better than 10 followers, and never stop to question the assumption that "many, more, most" is synonymous with "good, better, best". You don't need to have any self-esteem issues to start feeling like the number of people following you must somehow be related to your interestingness, your fame, your value as a contributor to the global conversation. My most recent tweet, "Steve has nothing to say", was a couple of weeks ago. Two people have started following me in the last three days.

The wider question, whether I do have anything to say, and if so what, how and to whom, will continue to occupy my thinking. I'll use Twitter to send a couple of direct messages to people I know in real life, so that they know they won't be able to contact me that way, and then I'll tweet a link to this blog post. Then, I think, that will be it. If I miss the Twitterverse terribly I can always come back; I don't think I will.

Post-Lent reflection

2009-04-22T17:09:00.004+01:00

It's rather more than six and a half weeks since my last blog post, though my Twitter feed has been busy, and I've even ventured into the confusion of another revamp to Facebook. Apart from being glad that Digsby plus Twitter integration means that I don't really need to go on the actual Facebook site, what have I learned?

Giving up telling people about me was easier than I thought it would be
Not knowing what was going on with other people was harder than I expected. I have got used to knowing what's happening with people since I joined Facebook, but because I never maintained friendships before that, I had no fallback methods (calling round to see someone, phoning them) of finding out what was going on for people.
Using Twitter and Facebook is self-reinforcing. Having "I'm not using Facebook for Lent" as a status is OK, but in most cases I don't want the last thing I said to be the last thing I say, so I keep wanting to make sure my status is up to date. One tweet leads to another.
Living online is pervasive; it encroaches steadily on real-world life, so that it's possible to spend increasing amounts of time reporting and reflecting on real-world life online, and then spending even more time reporting and reflecting on online life.
In a consumer society, there's a strong drive to be interesting or appear important, because that turns me into more of a saleable commodity. If you don't think this is true, consider Facebook not telling you (and everyone else) how many friends you have, or Twitter without the number of your followers in the sidebar.

All this ties into my ongoing thinking on humility and self-worth, and some emrging ideas about how to prioritise stuff in life, which I may or may not blog about sometime soon.

Lenten discipline (more silence)

2009-02-24T17:05:00.003Z

I've decided to fast from online life for Lent, and as a start I'm going to stop using Twitter and Facebook, and have changed my browser from Flock back to Firefox (and uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter add-ons). I'm also going to try and cut down on the surfing that is purely for distraction, though that may be difficult - how much time spent on BBC News is for keeping up to date and how much is avoiding doing anything else? I also want to try and keep up with writing, which will mean using Helium and Google Docs (as well as research). I will simply have to make sure I draw the line between what's necessary and what's not; I guess that's where the discipline comes in.

Hopefully in about six and a half weeks I'll let people know how it went.

Silence

2009-02-10T06:57:00.002Z

10 days ago I decided to take a break from using Twitter. Initially this was a fairly pragmatic decision - I was feeling down and the only things I wanted to write were miserable little snippets of my internal world. But then I started thinking about the spiritual value of silence (or at least online silence). I wondered how much of my blogging, tweeting and status updating is to keep people informed, and how much is to bolster my self-image: "Look at me. I'm here, I exist, I'm important!" So I decided that it would be at least a week before I used Twitter again. Of course, we then had interesting weather,but I resisted the urge to tell everyone that I, too, had noticed the snow. I've now got to a stage where the craving to tweet seems to be wearing off, so I may start doing it again - though cautiously.

My job

2009-02-04T15:13:00.004Z

On my way into work today (bus, not bike: I'm too tired and having to transport the laptop as well was the final straw) I seriously considered going and telling my boss that in fact I have been ~~lying~~ misrepresenting the facts when speaking to her recently. I rehearsed in my head as the bus went along Portsmouth Road how I had thought that saying I was happy with my work would be the most politic course of action. I went over the Itchen Bridge relishing the feel of the words "To be honest, I hate this job. It's just filling in pointless forms recording things that I couldn't care less about." And I arrived in town pleased that my mental health would no longer be adversely affected by having to smile and pretend that all this corporate nonsense held even the slightest interest to me.

Then I walked past Blackwells and was immediately seduced by a "Buy One Get One Free" offer on Teach Yourself books. On going into the shop, I found that in a small display, there were three books on writing (this, this and this). It was the work of a moment to acquire an even number of books, and I was out of the shop, reflecting on the kindness of Divine Providence in putting inexpensive guides to writing for a career in my way just when I was utterly sick of my current employment. (The more rational and sceptical of my readers will be relieved to know that I also reflected on my propensity to invoke the Divine for doing something I really wanted to do anyway - particularly when it involved spending money.)

My boss wasn't in the office this afternoon, so I didn't have an opportunity to ask her for a quiet chat. I did spend a little time submitting an article (which I'd written previously - not during work time today) to Triond, and followed a link from there to Helium, which looks quite promising. I have to say, even the sniff of a chance to earn money from writing has cheered me up - so much so that I sat in a meeting and agreed to work on the Quality section of the Community Services Contract and barely felt an urge to run screaming from the room.

Frustration

2009-01-29T18:01:00.002Z

I had some stuff that I really wanted to write down, but I had a series of frustrations and interruptions and now I've not only lost what I was going to say, but have convinced myself that it was rubbish and not worth saying anyway.

Lose weight the difficult and tiring way!

2009-01-26T13:12:00.002Z

I had a look via Google at a couple of sites to try and work out how many calories I’m burning by cycling to and from work (not many, given the pain involved and how tired it makes me feel – but that’s because I’m basically too slow and it gets classed as “leisure” or “gentle” cycling. I will not record my thoughts on this on a public blog) and was struck just how many ads there are on fitness-related websites for quick, almost effortless weight loss. I could probably have spent an instructive couple of hours finding out how to target belly fat or lose 10lbs in a week with herbal supplements. Presumably enough people must sign up to become members or purchase herbal supplements to make these adverts worthwhile, but it did make me wonder about whether I should use my current weight loss as a springboard for an online business empire. The ad could be something snappy like “Lose weight by eating less and exercising more – even when you don’t feel like it”. Then I could sell interested customers my secrets to weight loss success. I still need to work on the details (which I obviously wouldn’t put on here, or else I’d never make any money, duh), but I think it could probably be something like

Be overweight and dissatisfied with your reflection in the mirror – good selling point this, as most of the people who are interested in weight loss already meet these criteria
Try to have teenage children around who will regularly point out how fat you are. For customers without teenage children, we could perhaps offer a discounted rental service – “For only 24.99 per hour, a fifteen year old will sit in your lounge and make disparaging comments about your belly”
Make a decision that health risks, disastrous body image AND snarky comments are too much and you’d rather find an alternative way of suffering
Get up at least half an hour earlier than you have to (an hour earlier at weekends). Weigh yourself, then exercise. A Wii Fit is good for this, as it will combine weighing you with motivational messages and will even give your Mii a huge gut to really ram the point home. The best exercise, however, is to go out for a run. If possible, start doing this in the winter, so that you can drag yourself out in the dark, as well as having a good chance of rain or freezing temperatures.
Start walking to places instead of driving, and then take up cycling to work instead of catching the bus. Try to make sure that your route has the lowest point in the middle, so that whichever way you go, you’ll always finish with a hill.
Drastically change your eating habits. Breakfast should be a bowl of bland cereal with skimmed milk, or possibly plain porridge. Don’t even think about sugar. Evening meal should be less than half of your total calorific input for the day. Apart from that, all you eat is fruit. Lunch and snacks are fruit. Any fruit you like. Apart from bananas. Or dried fruit of any kind.
Drink lots of water. Then drink more, until you slosh when you walk.
Set yourself challenging weight loss goals and berate yourself when you don’t achieve them.
Follow these simple steps (plus our guaranteed extra step, only 59.99) and you too can lose weight frustratingly slowly over a period of several months.

I think that about sums it up. Re-reading this, I realise that I’ve even got a name for my wonderful regime – “An alternative way of suffering”.

Small achievements

2009-01-21T14:52:00.004Z

It seems appropriate that this is my 200th blog post and I'm recording having achieved something. I finally managed to cycle to work this morning, after weeks and weeks of not getting around to buying a new rear wheel and then several days of not fitting the inner tube and finally having to buy a new pump, followed by another inner tube when my brand new one blew a hole. I think it was sometime last year that I last cycled to work, though the memory is old enough to have faded quite a bit now. I can't even be sure whether it's more than a year since I've been on my bike. It's certainly a lot longer than that since I cycled any further than the 4.5 miles into the middle of Southampton - I can't remember doing any significant journeys since we moved down here 10 years ago. So I'm quite pleased that I managed to go 12.45km (7.74 miles) without serious injury - by which I mean that the pain in my legs isn't bad enough to stop me from cycling home again.

Cycling will not only help save money spent on bus fare, it will also help towards the other area where I'm achieving a little: losing weight. It's still too early to start saying "I've lost x amount since Christmas" but I've now lost enough that it's obviously the result of doing exercise and eating sensibly rather than just natural fluctuations in my weight. Getting the Wii Fit for Christmas has actually been a big boost - apart from the fact that it's a fun way of being a bit more active, it's a significant motivation to see a graph of my BMI and weight going up or (hopefully) down.

There are still lots of things I need to do, or to do better, but I'm confidently looking forward to more cycling, more weight loss - and another couple of hundred blog posts.

My journey to work this morning

Getting a bit of fresh air

2009-01-19T12:39:00.004Z

Decided to go out for a brisk walk over to the greengrocers in Shirley rather than wandering round to Tesco. This meant that (a) I got some exercise (b) I bought some fruit for healthy snacks and (c) I supported a small independent trader rather than a massive chain.

18 minutes, 2.4km, 175 calories. Thank you Nokia.

Twitter Grader

2009-01-19T10:33:00.002Z

This is a bit sad. What's worse is that I look at this and think "How could I get more followers so that I can move up the rankings?" And then I get depressed because I'm less interesting than the Red Funnel Ferry.

No, it's OK, life is not a popularity competition. It doesn't make any difference to my self worth whether 6 or 60 or 600 people choose to be informed about the minutiae of my life. (But if you are reading this and use Twitter, please follow me, please please please)

Thanks to James for the link and helping me realise that the world is, in fact, madder than I suspected.

Teeth

2008-12-29T13:03:00.001Z

There’s an important difference between less and fewer. Of course, when I say “important”, I mean “important to me”, but it’s one of those little things that I like to get right. “Less” is used when there aren’t any numbers involved, “fewer” when there are. So, for instance, there are fewer days left in 2008 than there were last week, but less time.

This distinction is important, because I’m reflecting on the fact that I have less teeth in my mouth than I did a week ago, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I had fewer teeth. I still have just as many teeth as I had earlier in December, but one of them in particular is a lot smaller than it used to be because first the outside bit of tooth came away from the ancient filling, and then on Saturday the filling, complete with small protruding screw, came out as well, leaving me with a little jagged bit of tooth sticking down from my gum. Hence me being in a situation where I have the same amount of teeth, but less total tooth.

Unfortunately this is not the only bit of tooth to have parted company with my jaws; I’ve had several come detached since the summer. And what’s more, I was warned that this very thing would happen. A couple of years ago, when I last went to the dentist, he told me that unless I had work done, then my back teeth would fall apart. He then told me that I would have to pay £1500 for the initial work, with the result that (a) I didn’t even try to find out how much it would cost in total and (b) I didn’t go back again. Well, he was right, but on the other hand we all had a very nice holiday last year. We’ve since discovered that as dentists go, he was a very expensive one, but nonetheless there’s no way that I can go to any dentist now without needing to take out a loan.

So far, the small remaining fragment of tooth doesn’t hurt (unlike the broken bit on the other side of my mouth, but that only hurts sometimes when I bite down hard with it and so doesn’t really constitute a problem), which means that I can put off doing anything about it for a while. I assume that it (or the other broken teeth) will probably cause problems at some point, and that I’ll have to have it pulled out – assuming that that’s the cheapest option – but until then, I’ll just have to content myself with knowing that while having less money than I’d like means fewer options for personal healthcare, at least it’s grammatically correct.

Today, I hate my job

2008-12-22T10:43:00.001Z

Came into the office this morning. Thought vaguely about saying a general “Good morning” to the other people who were already there, but was too discouraged by the fact that nobody even looked up when I walked in. Sat and waited while my laptop took forever to boot, listening to other people being greeted when they came in and laughing and swapping stories about their weekends and a party that they’d all been to. Checked my emails, to find a circular for everyone saying that the leaving party for a guy I worked with for several years has been postponed. Since I hadn’t known about the party, checked the original list of recipients further down the email to confirm that my name hadn’t, in fact, been on the (rather long) list. Thought about phoning people who have more important things to do than talk to me to find out what they are doing about childhood obesity, but put it off. Which was easy, as I couldn’t give a damn what they’re doing. Read through a draft of a document which is being circulated for comments, but was so bored by the same old facile platitudes and aspirational targets that I couldn’t bear to read more than a couple of pages. My boss asked if I was busy, so I said I could manage to fit something in if it was urgent, and she explained that there are some projects that need to be put into a standard reporting framework, and since I’m apparently freakishly talented for being able to understand the reporting framework in the first place, could I put someone else’s information into boxes so that people who think it’s important will be able to see at a glance what’s happening.

Will have to get on with the stupid obesity stuff soon, as have been putting it off for ages, and apart from putting information in forms, need to have some way of filling up the rest of today and tomorrow. And then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday next week. And then there’s going to be a whole new year of roughly similar nonsense. Hooray.

Synchronise me, baby!

2008-12-12T15:02:00.002Z

I've given up on using 30Boxes, lovely though it is, and have gone back to Google Calendar, and all because of the wonderfulness of GooSync. My online calendar, synchronised with my N95 calendar. Ooh yes.

Legalism

2008-12-12T14:07:00.004Z

For a while now I’ve been working through “Celebration of Discipline” with a friend, and I have to say that it’s extremely challenging as well as helpful. The premise of the book is that, for all our efforts to change ourselves, there are some things that we just can’t do by our own efforts, and that living a Christian life (in the fullest sense of being like Jesus) is one of those things. So instead we need to ask God to change us, and we engage with this through the practice of the Disciplines. There’s a lot more than that, including ideas like Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace”, but basically the idea is that the disciplines help to put us in a place where God can work in and through us.

One of the other themes of the book is the temptation to legalism, and it's that I've been thinking about recently. Richard Foster describes a narrow path with a precipice each side. On one side of the path is the temptation to believe that there's nothing we can do to change ourselves, and just have to sit back and wait for God to do things to us. On the other is the belief that we can earn salvation by keeping lots of rules. It's this legalism to which I am tempted to stray at the moment: I'm discovering what a delicate balance it is between wanting to do more of something positive and using my failure to do those things as a stick with which to beat myself.

I wonder how many things there are that change from "should" to "ought". I should lose some weight - I'd be healthier and likely to live longer if I did - but the guilt after eating pizza and ice cream definitely comes from the (slightly, but vitally) different "I ought to lose weight". I think there's something here about our willingness to do what's right: if the things we should do are in fact going to be good for us, whether that's getting enough sleep, being honest or recycling plastic bottles, then surely we should want to do them. Of course, we don't; we do things that are bad for us and those around us. So we surround ourselves with rules and laws to keep us in line, which we then break. I remember reading about Foucault's use of the panopticon as part of an argument of how we internalise control and keep ourselves under surveillance, and I think that there's some truth in that, but more than that I think that there's a human tendency to keep moving between two ideas: that I am rational and given freedom to make choices I will make the right choices for me and society, or that I am flawed and likely to make poor choices, and therefore need guidance, correction and discipline from others. Oversimplifying massively, I think the first leads to free market economics, laissez-faire, humanism, religion that emphasises grace, equality and education-as-improvement; the second leads to education-as-instruction, protectionism, an increased role for the State and religion that emphasises guilt.

So here's my question for myself today: what am I doing that is a choice based on knowing what will be best, that I can feel satisfied with after doing it, or can freely choose not to do if I so wish, and what am I doing that is based on feeling that I really ought to be doing it whether I want to or not, that I might feel miserable about having to do or will feel guilty about not doing?

Tesco denies prices hit by inflation

2008-12-10T16:09:00.002Z

Night time carousel

2008-12-09T07:57:00.003Z

This happens very rarely: I see something and imagine what a photograph of it would look like. I take the photograph, and then the finished picture looks almost exactly how I originally imagined it.

This carousel is by the Bargate in Southampton. I walked past it on my way home from work on Friday and was struck by the contrast between the bright lights and the darkness behind it.

Things to do

2008-12-04T07:00:00.004Z

Things I need to do: finish the bathroom, mend the hole in the hall ceiling, sort out the heating and hot water, sleep more, get some exercise, eat properly, help look after children, help get the house ready for Christmas, move Rachel's room around.

Things I want to do: ~~finish the bathroom~~, ~~mend the hole in the hall ceiling~~, ~~sort out the heating and hot water~~, sleep ~~more~~, ~~get some exercise~~, eat ~~properly~~, ~~help look after children~~, ~~help get the house ready for~~ Christmas, ~~move Rachel's room around~~.

Facebook friends

2008-11-11T13:55:00.003Z

I quite often click through to the page on Facebook that shows "People you may know", and then delete any people I've never actually heard of until I'm left with a page of people who I do know but wouldn't ask to be a Facebook friend.

Is this odd?

Greed

2008-11-10T17:00:00.002Z

I really must rid myself of the belief that if one of something is good, then two will be better. I went over to Tesco for something to eat mid-afternoon, and they were reducing the price of some sandwiches. I picked up a Healthy Choices prawn mayonnaise sandwich for 49p, and then thought "That's less than half price - I could get two and still spend less." So I ended up with two packs of sandwiches, when one would have been fine; 250 extra calories when I really need to lose weight; 49p less in my pocket than I would have had.

Sometimes, more than enough is too much.

Reuben's Confirmation

2008-10-31T12:28:00.004Z

I'm really looking forward to Reuben being confirmed tonight, partly because it's a good thing in itself, partly because it's a (biological and church) family celebration - I don't have enough parties - and partly because it's a parenting thing.

A while ago when I was looking at the atheist bus stuff I browsed to the justgiving page for Alpha Course bus ads. Someone there had written "£2 to encourage you to target your indoctrination at consenting adults instead of undiscriminating children. It's good to talk." Having grown up with a faith that worked really well until I started asking questions in my late teens, then given up on faith entirely and gone away from God, and having had to think hard about what I believe and why, and needing a faith of which I can ask searching questions, I sincerely hope that we've been able to bring up our children to know about God, but also to have a faith that is flexible enough to grow with them. I think that the fact that Daniel has rejected Christianity altogether is at least encouraging that we've not just "indoctrinated" our children. Unless, of course, we're really not very good at indoctrination.

I probably feel just as frustrated with non-Christians who reject Christianity because it's "organized religion" or "just a myth" as I do with Christians who have a "simple faith", by which they mean they never ask questions. I know that I'm guilty of deciding that I'm not going to be a Muslim or a Buddhist without fully investigating the claims that Islam or Buddhism make, but at least I make that decision because I've made a thought-through decision for Christ, and it would be hypocritical to then consider other religions. (This doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to learn about other religions and belief systems, so that I can understand and respect those who practice them.) I also know that there are a lot of Christians who put people off Christianity through bigotry and intolerance or answering every honest question with a quotation from the (King James) Bible. But I remain convinced that Jesus is who he says he is and that an adult Christian faith, which Reuben will be confirming he has tonight, should be both flexible and robust enough to stand up to whatever questions and doubts and objections are thrown at it.

So I'll be very proud of Reuben tonight, not only because he has chosen to confirm publicly that he is a Christian, but also because he is a young man who knows how to think, and and has made an individual and thoughtful choice.

Which is pretty much all you could ask in a son.

Atheist bus advert

2008-10-23T16:20:00.003+01:00

I shared this the other day, and I was going to write something about it at the time, but you know how it is, busy, busy, busy, lazy, etc; anyway I've still been thinking about it and wondering what it is about this that particularly made me pause. I suspect that it's because although I'm a Christian, I absolutely sympathize with Ariane Sherine: I think that bus adverts that threaten eternal damnation are bad news, not Good News. I was initially all for starting a campaign to have bus adverts saying "There is a God: he wants you to stop worrying and enjoy your life (Luke 12:22, John 16:24) - actually I still think that this might be a good idea - but more importantly I think that we Christians need to think carefully about the way that we present Jesus to the world. Despite Richard Dawkins - whose work I used to quite like - saying idiotic things like "thinking is anathema to religion" (ah yes, Professor Dawkins, the complete lack of Christian and other religious writers and academics for the last 1000 years is convincing evidence for this statement), I'm sure that there is a good case for engaging people with the Good News that Jesus makes a positive difference, here and now in this life, rather than suggesting that he's waiting around until the end of time to get you back for every little thing you ever did wrong. The British Humanist Association wants people to ask questions, to think for themselves and to enjoy life. If the Church doesn't want the same things, we're all in trouble.

Conversation

2008-10-20T16:01:00.002+01:00

I have kind of mixed feelings about last night's Conversation. On the one hand, having Celia provide a focus for it - and giving notices about this - meant we had a lot more people come than have attended recently. On the other hand, those who attended were also quite a bit older than our usual demographic, which meant that we had to lose the background music, which I guess I always saw as part of the "cafe-style" atmosphere we were trying for.

But... people were very willing to move around, there was a lot of very animated conversation going on, including (from what I observed) some really thoughtful stuff about how we as a church may appear to others who are different in some way from us. I suppose we'll have to see what kind of feedback we get over the next week or so. I can't even really pin down what I imagined Conversation would look like if it really took off, but I know last night was different from whatever that mental picture might be.

The other interesting thing, from my point of view, was that I invited in a couple of lads who were playing football outside when I arrived. They didn't last long in the main room with everyone else - though it did make me wonder if that might have been different with the usual smaller and younger crowd - but did stay and chat for a bit with me and James in the Welcome Area. It made me realise that I've missed that kind of conversation, where you can be talking about the Atonement and someone else just talks over you with some violent/gross anecdote, so you stop and then backtrack again. It also reminded me that actually I'm quite happy to talk to people about Jesus/Christianity/the Bible (why doesn't it have a blurb on the back, wondered one of the girls who came in), and I feel quite happy talking about that and answering questions like "Are you a Jew? You been circumcised?", "Why do good things happen to bad people?" or "When God wanted to kill everyone, why didn't he just snap his fingers and kill them straightaway instead of sending a flood so that they died slowly and horribly?" Hmmm. Slightly sad that I can't do talking to young people about Jesus for a job, but glad that I had a chance to do it last night.

So, remind me what this 'blogging' thing is...

2008-10-09T16:09:00.004+01:00

I haven't posted anything here for ages, I know; I've been so short of inspiration that it's taken me weeks to think of an excuse for not posting. However, my lovely Zude home page has disappeared, to be replaced with a piece of ugliness that wants me to sign up to Google Sites - which I tried, and it took me less than ten minutes to be severely unimpressed. So I shall now use this as my home page, and see if I can do a bit of tweaking with the template.

Supermarkets

2008-09-19T15:06:00.002+01:00

For your delight and delectation, another piece published via Triond.

Please take a moment to go to the page and, if you would, another moment to tell others about it.

Thank you kindly

Writing for pennies (2)

2008-09-19T10:39:00.003+01:00

Suddenly, it's all worthwhile: screenshot from my Triond page

Writing for pennies

2008-09-18T09:59:00.003+01:00

I've thought for a long time about trying to earn some extra money by writing: I'm fairly confident that I can string a sentence together, and I occasionally have what seems to me to be an original idea. The problem has been that writing novels takes a lot of time, non-commissioned TV scripts rarely get accepted and sending short stories to magazines is an excellent way of building up an impressive collection of rejection slips (which all writers get, I know).

I had a look at freelance writing online, which looks possible - there are a lot of sites offering work writing short articles - but it helps a lot to have a body of previous work at which prospective employers can look. I've therefore decided to try Triond, who will accept articles, pictures, etc. on any subject, and then publish it on one of their syndicated websites. Using a formula involving page views and ad clicks, they then pay a few cents into my Paypal account.

The first such piece of mine is here. I know it's not exactly literature, but I'd be extraordinarily grateful if either or both of my readers could go have a look at it, and if possible mark it with their favourite social bookmarking site (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.) and email their friends to say "Hey, read this." Doing so may make the difference between Hovis and Tesco Value bread for me come the end of the month...

Ideas that are more personal will still appear from time to time on this blog, but those times when I get a thought in my head and think "I could maybe blog about that sometime" will hopefully turn into articles for general consumption.

Saturday Night Live

2008-09-15T12:13:00.001+01:00

Verse of the day

2008-09-10T11:34:00.002+01:00

I have no idea how Bible Gateway generate their 'verse of the day', which I get as an RSS feed, and I am cautious of taking single out-of-context verses and saying "That is just meant for me", in the same way as any random newspaper horoscope can seem meaningful, but I was both amused and moved to find that yesterday's verse was Titus 2:2 and then today's is Isaiah 46:4.

Because I need reminding

2008-09-04T16:38:00.004+01:00

I was feeling a bit rubbish earlier so I walked over to the Central Library in my lunchbreak, wandered around the novels and then went upstairs and picked up a copy of Angels on the Walls, which I'd read several years before. I sat down in the nearest seat and started reading. After a while I wanted to move to a seat with a table to rest the book on so I wandered across and picked one on the grounds that it was as far as possible from other people. I'd been sitting concentrating on the book, until a point where the author was talking about Jesus loving everyone, and my mind drifted off into thinking about John 3:16 and explaining that God so loved the world - not just the nice people or the people who are going to follow him - when I looked away from the book to the graffiti on the bit of wall in front of me. This is the first thing that I saw:

Harder, better, faster, stronger

2008-09-01T11:32:00.004+01:00

I've downloaded Nokia Sports Tracker for my N95, and it reckons that my usual circuit of the Green is in fact just over 1km, which means I have been running slightly further than I thought. In fact, I am now running further anyway, because I have decided, since it's September, to increase my daily run to three circuits of the Green: 3.28km this morning, according to Nokia. The Sports Tracker has all sorts of nifty features, including exporting my route to Google Earth; here's what I did yesterday:

Having looked at the map from this morning's run, the margin of error for position and altitude are pretty narrow, so I'm (a) impressed and (b) likely to trust the results.

It also calculates calories burned, so I can eat cream cakes and think "I already ran this much this morning."

Reflections

2008-08-29T13:54:00.002+01:00

I was just looking at Cumberland House on Google Earth, and I noticed that Grosvenor Square is full of reflected sunlight from the windows of the old Barclays building. Which is quite pretty, if you like that sort of thing.

Early morning runs

2008-08-26T13:38:00.001+01:00

I've just checked my route I run in the morning on the "Distance Measurement Tool" on Google Maps and reckon that it's more or less 950 metres going around the Green, so my current run, going round twice, works out at about 1.2 miles. The plan is to build this up each month - ideally by the New Year I'd like to be doing 5 laps (just under 3 miles) but I'll have to get a balance between wanting to build up fitness and having to get up ever earlier to make time for running!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

On top of the tower, Alcaudete castle

2008-08-06T21:21:00.001+01:00

We went to the castle today for the guided tour. Which was in Spanish. Despite lots of people, guide books and websites saying that everyone in Andalucia speaks English, in fact practically nobody here does. This is probably because this really isn't a tourist destination - which is great. I managed to gather from the woman from the tourist office who showed us round the castle that they simply don't get English visitors. Anyway, we are managing just fine, and causing much amusement in shops with our pointing and mangled phrasebook vocabulary.

France

2008-07-31T19:49:00.001+01:00

Sitting in MacDonald.s in Le Mans, free wifi but got to go now. All good so far

Health Secretary recognises the benefits of exercise

2008-07-24T14:49:00.001+01:00

DSC00041.JPG

2008-07-24T14:28:00.002+01:00

Hmm. As you can see, I'm trying out ShoZu, which seems to more or less do what it says on the tin on my W200i, though with a few not-very-clear menu commands (hence the picture above getting uploaded with its original title, not the one that I thought I'd given it, and without a description. But, it does seem a nifty little Java app for sending stuff from my phone to Facebook, Twitpic, Blogger - or lots of other places - so I guess I'll persevere with it.

Just for clarity, the picture above was sent from my phone, without going into a browser, just by using the ShoZu app. All this text I added later on my laptop.

Slogan

2008-07-24T09:06:00.000+01:00

Today: better than yesterday, not as good as tomorrow

Sunshine superprophet

2008-07-22T16:59:00.002+01:00

I had Donovan's Sunshine Superman stuck in my head, and I actually thought about this, but then I thought "No, God's not speaking through a Donovan song. The lyrics are just hippy nonsense."

Then I realised (after two days of having the tune coming back into my head, even when I've been listening to other stuff), that in fact I only had one line that was going through my head, over and over again.

The line?

"When you've made your mind up forever to be mine"