Bishop Alan’s Blog

Licensed Insanity, or what?

2009-07-11T10:58:00.004+01:00

Just capping off thoughts about the God I don’t believe in, whilst on a train I noticed a story online from the New Zealand Herald that definitely belongs in the “Don’t try this at home” tray:

A 55-year-old man who beat his daughter over the head with a lump of concrete when she refused to go to his Mormon church “does not understand what all the fuss is about,” Hastings District Court has heard.
Judge Geoff Rea said on February 22 this year Muliipu had become involved in an argument with his daughter who refused to attend church. He chased her down the street and back into the house picking up a lump of concrete along the way. He then whacked her over the head in a bedroom with the concrete causing skin on her head to split and start bleeding. They were both “covered in blood” and he kicked her in the face causing bruising...
Defence lawyer Roger Stone told the court Muliipu had been angry his daughter refused to go to church. He had been under stress before the incident. He was a “proud” man who was “disappointed” his daughter had elected not to follow his Mormon faith...
Judge Rea said a probation officer's report made “grim reading” because he “still does not understand what all the fuss is about.” He had been ejected from an anger management course because of his views and had an inability to understand “whacking someone on the head is unacceptable.” In the circumstances there was only one response and that was imprisonment. Muliipu was sentenced to 12 months in jail.

Enthusiasm and sincerity are not enough. As Jesus’ scribes and pharisees strugged to see, religious commitment is validated not in its own terms alone, but by its fruits. Put another way, human anger does not work the righteousness of God... Crazy is crazy.

The God I don’t believe in

2009-07-09T06:07:00.001+01:00

Some pastoral disasters, along with many reactions to authority, have an interesting a whiff of Sylvia Plath’s “daddy, daddy you bastard, I’m through” about them. Our images of father figures certainly play out in our images of God, for good or ill. Like the Policeman in the sky, the Omnicompetent Fat Controller the Atheists rightly reject, “Almighty Gawd,” is a long way away from the God and Father of our lord Jesus Christ — more like Blake's nightmare vision of Nobodaddy — manipulative, angry, vengeful, controlling. Nobodaddy deals in Certainty not Clarity, Ideology not Mystery, Status not Reality, Politics not Truth, Control not Trust. He is less than half the truth. He uses words as weapons, not the creative impulse to make the world.

Cue a poem by Martin Bell:

Instruction for my Godson
(To William Redgrove)

God help me, I’m supposed to see you’re told
All about God the Father. So my beard mutters:
There are always two Fathers, one Good and one Bad.
You can always tell the Bad One, he’s always around.
Particularly first thing in the morning,
Scruffy and screaming for a razor-blade,
Wondering who to eat up for his breakfast —
He won’t eat you however much he shouts.
I’m not trying to sell you bad old Nobadaddy,
Learn to shrug off his sessions on his throne
Farting thunderbolts and belching clouds.

The Good One has a different way with Clouds; he watches.
He knows fifty-seven ways at least of looking at them,
He addresses them politely, and his looking
Can hold them still in the sky.
Martin Bell

Why ordination? Why today?

2009-07-08T08:13:00.006+01:00

I was overjoyed to ordain three stipendiary Petertide priests for Buckinghamshire at St Mary’s Aylesbury on Sunday evening. In an age where everything seems consumer driven, functional and changing, Western churches can easily lose the script about the meaning of ordination. I gave the candidates some words from the Evangelical theologian and translator Eugene H. Peterson:

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shop-keepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shop-keepers’ concerns — how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shop-keeping; religious shop-keeping, to be sure, but shop-keeping all the same... “A walloping great congregation is fine, and fun,” says Martin Thornton, “but what most communities really need is a couple of saints. The tragedy is that they may well be there in embryo, waiting to be discovered, waiting for sound training, waiting to be emancipated from the cult of the mediocre.”

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God.

That last sentence is the great clue to ordination. Peterson goes on to explain exactly what it is people need from ordained priests in our kind of society, and why:

We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don’t trust ourselves — our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know that we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and that there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of word and sacrament, in the middle of this world’s life.

Minister with word and sacrament to us in all the different parts and strands of our lives — in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn’t the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: word and sacrament. One more thing: we are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community.

We know that you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you.

We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.

There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise, right now, that you won’t give in to what we demand of you then. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.

There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing — God, kingdom, gospel — we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives.

Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, I have to record one magical moment — the sort of thing that makes this job such complete joy at times. As we came out of the Church, just the new priests, Rosie the chaplain and I, a photographer came round. “That man,” said David Cloake with his local knowledge, “was the first on the scene of the Great Train Robbery.” “Really?” said Paul Collins, former Police Officer. “I always thought that was Ronnie Biggs.”

Dumb versus Intelligent Conservatism

2009-07-06T07:50:00.012+01:00

I used to take the Daily Telegraph seriously. It was sometimes over to the right of the gentleman on the left, but it was good for sport and contained an extensive compendium of what was going on around the place. In a slightly contrarian way, I have always valued Conservative insights as food for thought, even, no especially, if I didn’t entirely agree with their starting points. Neil Davies’ Flat Earth News said significant things about the decline and fall of Fleet Street as a serious source of comment, and this week I noticed one story, nothing to do with religion, that really says a lot about the kinds of dogs to which the Telegraph is presently going.

Screamed the Telegraph story, and I smelt a rat. Is this our old friend “Rape is really the Victim’s fault?” I wondered. When I worked in a prison, I noticed it was the story rapists used to tell themselves, anyway. I never did believe it, myself.

Said the Leicester University press release. Notice, and ponder, the difference. Now you know how the subs at the Telegraph view this subject.

But what of the story itself? As explained by Dr Ben Goldacre, this is what happened. Sophia Shaw, MSc student, conducted some research for a dissertation. The point of making trainee scientists write such things is to learn how to turn tentative preliminary research into disciplined scientific conclusions. She hasn’t yet done this for her, as yet unfinished, dissertation. Turned into a press release, à la Flat Earth News, her work became the germ of the Telegraph story. Not surprisingly, she objects to her work being manipulated and turned into rubbish by the Telegraph for its own idiotic purposes.

Looking at hot button issues, let’s turn to the grand-daddy of them all, the gay issue in Church. I turned not to the Telegraph, but to Cranmer, for a genuinely perceptive, intelligent Conservative take:

...dear readers and communicants, homosexuality is not an issue worthy of schism: it is simply not of the order of the sort of debate that used to divide the Church: the divinity of Christ, for example, or the nature of his humanity – the great controversy at the Council of Nicea in AD325 – or even over liturgy or the transforming nature of infant baptism. The issue of homosexuality affects only a tiny minority of its adherents: it is of distinctly secondary, even peripheral, scriptural importance.

The role of the Bible in addressing the modern question of the place of the homosexual in the church is complex, not least because where it is mentioned in Scripture, the authors give little sustained consideration of the issue as it manifests in the modern world. The nature of a biblical perspective will invariably be affected by the questions posed of the Bible, by the particular hermeneutic employed, and by the unavoidable perspective which each scholar brings to his or her reading of the Bible. While some may have an instant negative reaction, others seek to understand the debate in the different and changing circumstances in which we now live. Still others, who may identify themselves as homosexual Christians, struggle to express either their feelings or their thoughts on the issue. They are themselves divided into those who acknowledge that homosexuality is a sin and therefore a call to celibacy, and those who assert that they also are made in God’s image and therefore seek to express their sexual desires in an intimate, monogamous relationship.

That God established an objective, moral order in creation, and continues a work of re-creation through Jesus, is a source and standard of all that it beautiful, good and true. If such a moral order means anything, there may be no via media on the issue of homosexuality. Accepting theological diversity is not the same as tolerating all beliefs and practices, because ultimately the Church is called to be holy because God is holy (Lev. 19:2; Mt. 5:48). We cannot as Christians just give way to ‘you believe this, I believe that’ approach to being together, or moving apart, in the Church. Nor even can we be content with the rather cheap model of ‘reconciled diversity’, meaning benign tolerance, which many Christians find an easier option to the costlier pursuit of real, ‘visible’ unity. We need to continue to struggle together for the truth, to find the right and godly balance between the call to solidarity and the recognition of difference. Presently, nowhere is this more important – especially in the Anglican Communion – than in the area of sexuality.

But Cranmer is persuaded that the whole issue may really be a non-issue because the wrong question is being asked. His Grace posited a few days ago that the modern era is sex-obsessed: we live in a consumer society, and there is little that is marketed without a glance, a wink, a flirt, a breast, or allusions to sexual intercourse, because ‘sex sells’. If one were to judge by the media (which is more frequently a mirror to society than a catalyst for change), the fascination with people’s sex lives is now more important than politics, religion, philosophy or even Mammon. Jesus may have had to address the latter as the dominating idol of his era; his judgement was that one may not serve both God and Mammon (Mt. 6:24). But he did not enter into discussion on the fiscal minutiae of cash, credit, bonds, shares, loans or interest; a macro-warning not to be obsessed with Mammon was sufficient. If one were to apply the same principle to the modern idol – ‘Eros’ – it is doubtful that Jesus would address its sub-divisions (gay, bi, straight, oral, anal, tantric); he would most likely directly challenge society’s obsessive fixation with Eros, and by so doing confront both those who prioritise issues of sexuality and those in the church who presume to judge them.

By devoting so much time and effort to the ‘gay issue’, instead of challenging society by deconstructing the question or focusing on poverty and wealth (for example), the church is simply showing itself to share the same obsessions as the world. Paul allowed no compromise on the restriction of sexual activity to heterosexual, monogamous marriage. But such an ethic seems almost utopian to our sex-besotted age, in which it appears at times that one’s identity is made to reside in one’s sexual organs and their untrammeled exercise. The issue for the Church of England is that this debate has been blown out of all proportion; it is neither a battle for the soul of the church, nor an issue worthy of schism. It is a question utterly peculiar to this era, and those on both sides of the divide – both politicians and theologians – might consider toning down the rhetoric and the apologetics, and instead preaching a message that, contrary to society’s thinking, sexual expression is neither a necessary line of inquiry in every human interaction, nor an essential component in human fulfilment.

If, as is suggested here, we do indeed live in a society which has a basically gormless, obsessional, and corrupt over-sexualised self-image, playing along with its assumptions about how these things work is less than the best we can do. Church has to position itself somewhere other than as the thrower of custard pies from the midst of the fray, whether from right to left or left to right. Rather it exists to bear witness to the Scriptures and our tradition — a deeper, richer, more ancient and meaningful wisdom. We offer it as a resource to our society, which it may care to take more seriously when it has had enough of its current obsessions and becomes seriously interested in human beings — a truer, more humane vision of what we could be than simply whizzing down the slide, as Philip Larkin used to say “like free bloody birds.”

I have also been chortling over the Archbishop’s recent run in with Facebook, who took a dim view of His Grace’s ecclesiastical title, whilst simultaneously allowing that old scoundrel Cardinal Wolsey to keep his. After a surreal correspondence with various cheery FB Sockpuppets, in the best traditions of cussed Englishness, His Grace refused to take the sleight lying down and set himself up with a new account in the magnificent name of “Ayatollah Cranmer.” Right wing, but fun. Inexplicably, he was allowed his new moniker. Draw your own concusions...

Intex: A bigger splash

2009-07-05T10:28:00.019+01:00

Now in its third year, the splash pool is turning out to be the best £150 we ever spent on eBay. With clergy family barbecues coming on, our whole family extends a cordial welcome to its other afficionados, hoping the weather this year will be up to it. With new solar heating the water has reached temperatures of up to 32 degrees recently, four or five degress higher than it ever managed with its original 7Kw electric heating.

With school friends etc,. it gets hours of use many days. One first this year was adoption and families workers on a staff day here using it for a teambuilding game with paper boats. On a cloudier Sunday, I just wanted to try and convey the full solemnity of the naturally Anglican way our children have been interpreting the instructions printed in six languages on the side, about not jumping in:

Hoovering up Crime and Johnny Depp

2009-07-04T07:46:00.017+01:00

Public Enemies, like every gangster movie, contains dirty rats, and requires us to be sufficiently open to a Robin Hood point of view to hope secretly that the dirty rats get away with it. We are fascinated by damaged people and evil, but faintly slimed for taking an interest at all. Actually we know the world would be an infinitely nicer place without Bonnie and Clyde, or whoever, but can’t help wondering why they did it. We identify with them as a means of reassuring ourselves we are really not at all like them. And people, especially sixty years ago, loved to see authority made an occasional monkey of, as long as we don’t get mugged on the way home. That’s where the fun and fascination would end.

For those who miss James Cagney Jr and wonder when comes such another, Public Enemies is a beacon of fun and hope. This movie is tough and occasionally nasty, repellent but not revolting. Some may not even notice Michael Mann’s decision to make the movie on HD Video rather than the stuff you take to the chemists, but I was fascinated by the result.

With HD-V there's more detail on the plate, and what I can only call a slight dark steel, bluish sheen around night scenes in the woods or down the dives of Chicago. Lighting the movie was a challenge — the best boy must have enjoyed the experience. I hazard a guess that low available light registers more readily and across a different part of the spectrum on HD-V. The whole effect, which ought to look more natural, actually looks more contrived, but approprate. It’s grittily detailed, ideal for old time dirty rats, and the dolls don't have the slightly airbrushed look Celluloid gives them. The result is rather documentary, an impression reinforced by the use of steadicams and low angles, putting us where the action is.

Johnny Depp does his rough diamond thing perfectly. Cap’n Jack Sparrow had a streak of Ronald MacDonald that was fun for about ten minutes but wore a bit thin over two hours with people over 12 years old. Depp’s Dillinger is an altogether deeper and more complex kind of psychopath. Marion Cotillard plays the faithful Moll faultlessly, providing excellent and absorbing chemistry between the principals.

Much as we know that the whole ruddy lot should be strung up, we are glad to come along for the ride, even with its repellent occasional violence, and slightly sorry when it’s over. That’s the sign of a first class gangster movie.

Placing itself in historical context, the film stays clear of O level sociology, and wisely majors on characterisation. J. Edgar Hoover is, like everyone else in this film, perfectly sketched — a scientific beureaucrat struggling to organise clearing raids into a jungle where the public representatives are as dodgy as the public enemies. Christian Bale is the sharp end of the feds’ operation. He’s sincere and occasionally frustrated to find himself as one of the good guys, unable to be as nasty as the bad guys. Amidst a sea of clean-cut but essentially expendable G-men, his Agent Purvis conveys, perfectly, a sense of being a brighter man than his profession requires him to look.

None of this is revolutionary, on a narrative level, but it’s perfectly executed and it works. If your idea of summer fun is Year One or Hannah Montana this will not float your boat. For those of us who prefer Dark Chocolate to Milky Bar, Public Enemies is absorbing, well-paced and characterful. For all the film’s occasional nastiness, it’s reassuring to know the midwest is not as flat and boring as some people say it is, and Dillinger’s appearance of fortuitous invincibility was, after all, an illusion. At a visceral level it’s always fun in a depression to see big banks treated with the contempt they deserve. As you see pretentious senior bank managers haplessly fumbling in terror to open the safe for Dillinger, people this side of the pond can think Fred the Shred. I hate to admit it, but the sight is sweet. For overseas readers, Fred is the real-life character who walked into a bank and got away with several million in a way Dillinger could only dream about, and was rewarded with a knighthood and pension on a desert island. But that’s another story, too improbable for a movie.

C of E: Historic, Sublime, Ridiculous

2009-07-02T07:18:00.015+01:00

Three thought provoking posts floated out of the blogosphere today, which say something very imortant to me about what our Church is, and what it is called to be, and how, in different ways. First up, a bon mot from Martin Jackson, parish priest of St Cuthbert Benfieldside, Co Durham, drawn from the annual Durham clergy gathering, on the immortal pairing of nostalgia and pews. As plans were drawn up to remove some, wailing arose:

“Someone died in that pew.” To which the parish priest had replied, “Then it had better go before it kills someone else.” At which another priest leapt to her feet and shouted, “Let me have it - I can put it to good use in my parish....

This led to a beautiful and extraordinary post from Kelvin Wright, a New Zealand priest who has been going through profound personal, spiritual, and ecclesial testing. Visiting Kent after a period of great uncertainty and disillusionment, he reflects profoundly on the meaning of the Church of England in its historical and cutural contexts:

Journeying to England has been an experience of the things which set this European country apart from the rest of Europe. A different currency, system of measurement and language and a deeper rigour about immigration matters are only part of it. In the rest of Europe you see the European flag flying as often as the national flag. Not in England. Here it's Union Jacks all the way, proclaiming a sense of difference and independence which is mirrored in the relationship of the Church of England to European Catholicism. This is a different church. Quirkily different. Proudly different. Sometimes different just for the sake of being different.

The Church of England is like that most English of jokes, a curates egg. Parts of it are excellent. The new life bursting out of Holy Trinity Brompton and the deep spirituality of Walsingham could not be more different but they are held in the same organisation and both are inspiring. I have been in dozens of small churches, though, where a tiny congregation struggles with the upkeep of their much beloved ecclesiastical museum (aka the parish church) with diminishing resources of money and personnel. I have seen both the church's impotence in the face of the increasing social and economic malaise which seems to be engulfing Britain, and her small courageous, and often ingenious attempts to make a difference. But it's the history which has helped me to understand the current Anglican church.

The church here is old. I met a vicar who spoke of the damage done to his parish church by "the invasion". He meant the one which took place in 1066 but he spoke of it as if it was last week. In every place the plundering of the dissolution, the ravages of Viking longboats and Luftwaffe bombers and the vandalism of the puritans have left their mark, and the current parishioners are dealing with them still. This is a church which has been part of the fabric of the society around it, and where the demands of being a social institution and of being the body of Christ have caused constant tension. Sometimes the church has become more a part of the social fabric than the spotless Bride of Christ, and it has failed. Sometimes though, it has been a witness to the Gospel in the face of hardship and oppression and sometimes the Spirit has caused rebirth, even centuries after a seeming full stop.

Unsurprisingly, it is where there is a continuing practice of spirituality that the church has flourished. Where there has been prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, meditation, social responsibility and almsgiving the Church of England has thrived. It has also thrived where there has been disciplined, holy, fearless leadership. To see the marks of the Church's history and to hear the stories has been to encounter this deep vein of spirituality and to feel again the influence of her sainted leaders. Where this rich seam is refound, as on Iona and in Mother Julian's cell, the 21st Century church has risen, seemingly invincible, from the ashes. It is this, the great treasure of our church, that I have glimpsed, and which I know to be the only hope of my own diocese and of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

I was raised a Methodist and chose to be an Anglican. After this month in England, I choose still to be an Anglican, but I know that much of what occupies our church and seems so important in our councils is froth and bubble: the detritus rising to the surface from the ongoing struggle with our wider culture. I choose to be an Anglican, but know that the only way for my own faith and my own parish to be viable is if I try to dive deeper and find the cool streams beneath. This seeking the depths must be what forms my ministry in this, the last decade of my life as a stipended Anglican priest. Which brings me to reflect on the third thread of my own journey: that inward one of my own soul.

The simple fact is you can’t write a cheque to “The Church of England” because it doesn’t, in any simple corporate form, exist, let alone had a bank account! What does exist is a messy bundle of several thousand ancient and modern trusts and corporations in context — and this reality is what Kelvin has captured. Those of us who live within it seldom see it anything like as clearly as he does from the outside.

That’s why detractors or zealous reformers can make no sense at all of the Church of England, as long as they imagine it is some kind of simple denomination or corporate organisation like Microsoft. Should it be more of that? Reading Kelvin’s beautiful reflection, he has captured a truth that would be profoundly threatened if it ever became so. In times of uncertainty and frustration, it’s easy to be attracted by autocratic models of church, Catholic or protestant, but they bring problems of their own.

Which brings me on to a thought from Ecclesologist and priest Nathan Humphrey, from St Paul’s K Street, Washington DC. A major custard pie fight has been going on in the US and elsewhere between Optimists and Pessimists about Progress. The Custard flying from Left to right is Justice-flavoured, and the Custard flying Right to Left is Orthodoxy flavoured. Custard is fun, but you can’t live on it; and this custard is largely sterile. In these circumstances, Nathan questions the facile use of terms like “inclusivity” — Inclusive of who, and why, and how — and concludes:

More and more, I am tending to think that any church that is not robustly ideologically diverse (that is, where there are safe spaces for conservatives and liberals to engage in dialogue, discernment, and conflict without the threat of broken communion) will end up a "niche church."

Diversity for diversity's sake is not an inherent good, nor does it necessarily promote justice. Diversity for the sake of maintaining a space wherein all may patiently form relationships with each other that will be mutually converting is more likely to lead to a fuller expression of justice, truth, and evangelical mission than any "niche" where everybody thinks like me.

The Church exists to be a humble delivery system for a greater Kingdom, within which human and divine truths can meet, try to recognise themselves, and, on a good day, take flesh. The ways they do this will be as quirky, occasional, and inconsistent as the human beings involved. But if you cut the human beings out of the picture, as they are, you exclude the people — and it’s the people God loves most of all, just as they are, but loves far too much to leave them that way...

Punishment, Stability and Community

2009-06-30T22:37:00.003+01:00

In my ordinary daily sequence of reading, prayer and meditation, I’ve been reading the really uncongenial part of the Rule of Benedict, chapters that deal with punshment in the community. To put things in historical perspective, corporal punishment was universal in the sixth century, and Benedict’s use of it minimal compared to contemporaneous sources. The Rule is not designed to absolutise the disciplinary practices of its age any more than the Parable of the Good Samaritan is designed to make people beat up Samaritans.

However, it is interesting to note who gets punished in the rule. Unlike our age, Benedict does not punish incompetence, human failing, ignorance, lack of spiritual intensity, failure, or saying the wrong thing openly. The rule does punish subversive grumbling, and sabotage of the community life. He expects dissent within the community, indeed encourages it as an expression of repect, but takes its toxic forms very seriously. A stable community cannot grow without basic respect, humility and realism all round. Community is not a syrupy and largely meaningless synonym for “everybody”, but a testing ground for character and motives.

So farewell then, if we want to walk in the way of Benedict, to email firestorms, hypocritical finger wagging, control by threats and manipulation, angry cynicism, and ego driven community sabotage. These need to be exposed for what they are, not tarted up with Conservative, or for that matter Radical suspenders. The community needs to be honest about what is really going on. Nobody gets punished for making bad tea, but however passionately they feel they are right, if they start slipping arsenic into it, three strikes and they’re out (another interesting Benedictine principle)

Sister can you spare an Enzyme?

2009-06-29T08:41:00.015+01:00

My Sister’s Keeper is a Weepy, OK, and if, like some of our household, Transformers floats your boat, it probably won’t be your movie of the year. However it combines superb acting, beautiful cinematography, and clean, sensitive direction. The film delivers some very special things — characters you care about who dance deftly round the edge of an emotional precipice without falling off. The big question throughout is the one New Yorkers thronged the docks asking as new installments of Dickens arrived in 1848 — “Is Litttle Nell dead yet?” Somehow they bring it off without seeming grossly manipulative.

A brilliant film then, but what’s missing? I can’t quite work out what it is. I haven’t read the Jodi Picoult novel. It may be that this movie lacks a twist at the end, but I doubt it. A version of Titanic that ran for an hour until the captain said “I gather there are Icebergs about. Let’s heave to for the night” would gain a twist, but who would want it? Something's not quite there about this movie on a deep, tectonic level.

The whole test tube baby manufactured life theme is a bit weird. How did wonderful people like Brian and Sara manage to bring a child into the world for the sole purpose, apparently, of providing their older daughter with spare parts? Perhaps they would never have come up with the notion without their family Dr Frankenstein in his wacky kiddie-doctor ties. It’s pronounced Frunken-steen, definitely, but the whole notion is a wee bit revolting, and leaves me wondering how little Anna grew up so normal under such a cloud. Being played by Abigail Breslin, the greatest, most gifted and empathetic kid in Hollywood, must help. She does deep as well as cute, and this is good news. It could be we just don’t know quite enough about how life would have been for this golden family if little Kate had never gotten cancer in the first place.

Perhaps this is a pro-Life versus pro-Choice pediatric Kramer versus Kramer, with an assistance dog thrown in. If so, it’s a new genre anyway. If I had more basic and extreme views in terms of the US life/choice thang, I might have sat closer to the edge of my seat. As it is, we know only too well that real life is complicated, usually messy, sometimes random and tragic. Book of Job questions lurk in the background, and without giving away too much of the plot, I was glad that virtues I hold dear, family love, honesty, and mutual respect won a kind of dark victory in the end.

Solar Heating Payback Time

2009-06-27T20:12:00.007+01:00

Avid readers of this blog may note that it started on 7 August 2007 with a piece about the new family splash pool — it cost £150 on eBay, and has brought countless hours of joy to various people from all around over the past three years. It gets, to put it mildly, intensive, almost daily use.

The day after it went in (2006), Nick came back with a bunch of friends from school who jumped into the freezing water. I went down to check everyone was undrowned, and a head emerged from the freezing waves to the immortal line “excuse me, mister; have you got a heater for this thing?” Three weeks and various old bits of washing machine linkage later we had heating but the cost of running it was not fun.

This year with the help of Ken the Swimming Pool man in High Wycombe we have bitten the bullett and upgraded to Solar Heating. The first day temperature was up to 21 degrees. After the sun today, the water reached 31 degrees, far higher than anything we have ever achieved with electricity. Going on Ken’s calculations, that’s payback in 6 weeks. Is this a record?

And this afternoon the pool sprung a leak. But that’s another story.

Michael Jackson Dead

2009-06-26T07:20:00.010+01:00

The Death of Michael Jackson is a significant milestone, if not quite a Kennedy moment. Thriller remains the highest selling album and video ever, and cutural historians may well see him as the Elvis of his generation.

However repellent and bizarre the Sun’s “Wacko Jacko” had come to look and sound, with his strange colour, weird childish ego and nose jobs, Jackson was an astonishingly able entertainer. For all his undoubted personal and musical eclipse, he still managed to sell out a run of 50 O2 concerts next month.

Jackson’s stage act defined a central strand of a whole generation’s culture. His seamless song and dance fusion and OTT stage effects had astonishing visual impact, delivered to audiences at one fell swoop and largely without computer graphics, fusing talent, hard work and meticulous craftsmanship. Fred Astaire once phoned him to compliment him on his dancing. Along with Freddie Mercury’s performances, Jackson’s were the popular entertainment phenomenon of their age, and his videos defined the field for a new art form.

Parents may well wag their fingers and draw attention to the ludicrous aspects of Jackson’s strangely blessed and stangely cursed fifty years — they certainly give pause for thought to any pushy mummy tempted to shove her little darling onto the stage at age 6. Good news — you become an icon. Bad news — your whole life is messed up. Just say no.

Driven by a desperate need to be loved, combined with an inability to grow up, Garland’s Law still applies, in good ways and bad: “Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else” Jackson’s ability and inability to do that, musically and personally, were the rub. It’ll make a hell of a movie, someday.

Join Facebook, Get Raptured

2009-06-25T20:06:00.006+01:00

Something very weird is going on. Yesterday Dave Walker put on his blog some interesting figures about people and interests on Facebook, establishing

18,623,700 people live in the United Kingdom and are on Facebook. 4,123,460 say they are 'single', 3,722,720 'in a relationship', 873,780 'engaged' and 3,228,320 'married'. Of 8,442,940 men, 3,566,820 say they are 'interested in women', 106,400 say they are 'interested in men'. Of 9,422,220 women, 3,200,880 say they are are 'interested in men', 281,800 say they are 'interested in women'.

Interests
1,220,280 of these people like 'sex', and an almost identical number like 'sleeping' (these were the single biggest numbers I could find for any interests, though there may be other very popular interests I haven't thought of!) 909,940 people like 'school' 663,580 people like 'pubs'

Religious interests
95,400 people like 'Christ'
90,860 people like 'the Bible'
77,020 people like 'Islam'
31,820 people like 'praying'
24,440 people like 'God'
15,740 people like 'prayers'
8,860 people like 'church'
6,560 people like 'Christianity'
3,740 people like 'confession'
1,820 people 'going to church'
440 people like 'Bible study'
240 people like 'Anglican Communion'

Church Mouse added figures for 'Jesus,' 108,240, and 35,500 'Jesus Christ'

Well, having an hur on a train this evening I thought I'd check the figures for myself. Today the whole population seems to be shrinking in a frightening and mysterious way:

(Yesterday) Today
Population (18,623,700) 15,514,660
Singles (4,123,460) 3,118,260
Relationship (3,722,720) 3,283,520
Engaged (873,780) 852,520
Married (3,228,320) 3,097,020

Men (8,442,940) 7,264,480
into women (3,566,820) 3,060,120
into men (106,400) 95,160

Women (8,442,940) 7,264,480
into men (3,566,820) 3,060,120
into women (106,400) 95,160

Get the idea? Something has happened to over 3 million, who are no longer among us. Even more disturbingly, only 6,834,220 claim to speak UK English. Even more unexpectedly, with only 4,620 Roman Catholics, 38,940 claim to be “Monks.”

Shome Mishtake?

Turnaround heads, renewed schools

2009-06-24T07:55:00.015+01:00

Good to see the Times celebrating success at Highcrest School in High Wycombe today, rightly praising the hard work that has transformed it. One of the highlights of my week has been a visit with fellow governors to the building site at Cressex Community School, also in High Wycombe.

For years Cressex was very much down the wrong end of the Buckinghamshire educational food chain. When I first visited Cressex a couple of years ago, I was, quite honestly, horrified by the utterly appalling state of buildings that had received no serious attention in years. Students encompassed a range of abilities and motivations, from pretty basic to frustrated. One or two staff were fantastically committed Cockleshell heroes, but the general picture was of containment, failure, disrespect and frustration.

When I asked a group of year 11 students how their school could be improved, I expected an obvious answer about buildings or facilities. The answer I got was completely different. “Our school would be worth going to if the staff had some continuity.” This sounded to me like students who actually wanted to learn, but had been badly let down. As a former numeracy governor (in another life), I also saw some inspirational extended numeracy work going on in year 7 — frankly a much higher standard of teaching and learning than I had seen that year in one County Grammar School.

So there was hope. Katy Simmons (Chair), fellow governors and friends in the community fought hard to have the whole site renewed, and after much struggle, Cressex is to be entirely renewed as part of the Government’s Building Schools for the Future Initiative. It’s really good to see a new school taking shape. There has been an evolving relationship with Wycombe Abbey, a centre of excellence, and one of the world’s highest achieving schools, where I am also a council member. This has involved a very high level of mutual engagement and earning, including a fantastic summer school week.

But of course renewing Cressex is about people, not buildings. Especially since David Hood, present head, arrived a year or so ago, the whole place is beginning to come together in a new way. Visiting earlier this year, I saw a couple of students who didn’t know I was watching spontaneously pick up litter. It’s noticeably more interactive, respectful, engaged. Attendance is up now, generally in the high nineties. There’s a proper and effective senior management team. A particular individual student problem was running, but I could see a team response. A larger number of parents offered places at Cressex next year are actually committing to coming to the school. These are all straws in the wind, but cumulatively the way things are going is the way they’ve got to go, if our students are to ever to receive the excellent learning experience the group of year 11’s I met three years ago never had.

So, watch this space, as the new school shapes up, physically and as a community. Kudos to Highcrest and the great work Shena Moynihan has done there. As a governor in a school that is working hard to turn around, one or two sour notes do sound, however:

The Government giveth, and the government taketh away. Whilst acknowledging all that is good, the National Challenge programme commits a major folly by bagging up all schools below a certain academic achievement line (30%) in one bin. There are, of course, schools that should close or merge. There are bad teachers and learners. Publicity-seeking sales puffs like National Challenge actually make it harder to turn things round, by waving the cane at everyone in the class. Crass one-size-fits-all assumptions about the process of renewal don’t actually achieve as much as our Political Wonks think they do.
We have a great leader in David, and the trends are visibly beginning to turn around. But he’s the first to say it’s a whole school community process, and climate does affect growth, as well as the gardener. I can guarantee renewal won’t happen without an able and dedicated educator leading the process, who's plugged in and up to the job. However, serious attention needs to be given by government at all levels to the rest of the process and the context they provide. Why will things renew? What people do you need, doing what and how? As in other selective authorities, the theory used to be that naff secondary moderns didn’t matter anyway, because their pupils would make their way in life, if they ever did, pretty much regardless of anything that had happened to them at their basic grotty schools. The strategy for anyone who showed any promise, against the odds, was to jet them out into a proper (= Grammar) school. Staff could struggle against it, students could bail out in frustration, but that unacknowledged pathetic philosophy oozed out of every rotten brick of the school I visited three years ago, every hole in the wall, every broken window, every collapsing roof. Changing that involves a different philosophical context and assumptions, as well as getting a new leader and trusting they will somehow just row the Atlantic single-handed. Staff, students, parents and governors need headroom and trust, resource and commitment as well.

Devil Gets Knotted in Stone

2009-06-21T17:23:00.012+01:00

Whilst out leading the patronal festival at St John the Baptist, Stone, this morning, I couldn’t help noticing the font. Heavily restored as it has been, it is still one of the most remarkable pieces of Norman Carving I’ve ever seen.

As well as various characteristic rope patterns, it carries a strange picture of a man (Adam?), his son crushing the serpent’s head, and representations of the Holy Trinity with fish & dragons.

It came from Hampstead Norreys in Berkshire, and has only been in Stone since 1845. E. F. M. Watson described the design thus in 1906:

The Monster on the Left is the Evil One with open mouth and unknotted tail, free to destroy and hinder the free course of the Fish, that is the Christian Faith. On the right is the same Evil power, but a Hand is in its mouth and the tail is knotted; it is being subdued by the might of the Three Persons in the Holy Trinity, though it still holds in its claws a human head, whose expression is one of hopelessness and terror.

The Church guide is a bit more down to earth:

The font which is Norman is richly carved all around the bowl, with scenes thought to depict the conflict between Satan and the Trinity. A dragon representing Satan is baring his teeth and waving his tail. We then see him muzzled by the arm of the Father, pecked by the Spirit in the form of a Dove, and having had his tail knotted by the Son.

Reeling from this encounter with things fantastic, among other fine flower arrangements, I noticed a windowsill display containing Pitcher Plants — hardly your standard bunch of daffs, but they looked rather triffid-like and unusual. I imagine they also keep the flies down in the summer.

Tyrants Quake: the Twits are coming

2009-06-20T08:20:00.006+01:00

or How new media, ubiquitous, social and global, can make monkeys out of repressive regimes ‚ incuding, perhaps, Old Media Barons’ fiefdoms. Here’s Clay Shirkey:

Two Real World Interludes

2009-06-19T08:10:00.008+01:00

As someone who leads a strictly non-profit, but I hope not entirely unproftable, life, I don’t do advertising, but my eye was caught by the Trail of Hope. In a year Slumdog drew attention to Indian Streetkids, two friends from South Africa have hatched a vision for creating a community of Capetown’s homeless young people, under the auspices of the MyLife foundation. Albert Arcona and Tendai Joe are riding motorbikes from Capetown to London this autumn, taking in various sights along the way — the HIV/AIDS context mkes the need particularly acute, and anyone interested in Streetkids, Zimbabwe, South Africa, could well want to be part of this project.

Meanwhile, Beyond the Fringe taught us there is a time in any struggle when a pointless gesture is called for. As thousands take to the streets of Tehran, there are not many oogedy boogedy Ayatollahs using Twitter, but we know many democracy campaigners are. If they open the main Twitter stream, which we know they are using as a significant tool in getting and keeping their act together, and see a large number of green avatars, they know they are not alone, and have an instant database of overseas friends and allies.

The proposal is that anyone anywhere else in the world who supports Iranian democracy can “Green their Avatar” to show solidarity and support to people who need it, when they need it. So, that’s my futile gesture for a bit. I'm greening my Twitter Avatar for a while in support of Iranian Democracy. If you’re a Real Twit, why don’t you?

If you could see him with my eyes...

2009-06-16T07:59:00.009+01:00

Many of us were disturbed by the bizarre way the BNP tried to twist Christian imagery in their recent election campaign to leverage decent people into Fascist ideology. It comes as no surprise that exactly the same thing was done in Germany in the 1930’s. Susannah Heschel logs the process at the highest levels in her study The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Jesus the Jew was rebranded by Eisenach Institute theologians, bizarrely, as an icon of Aryan racial “purity,” reflecting the Nationalist, Racist fantasies of the age.

But what knocked me off my seat was a Christian Century review of the book by Holocaust Studies Centre director Henry Knight, contending that we still have unfinished business with the Holocaust, and giving profound food for thought in these memorable words:

Jesus is Christianity's burning bush. His presence beckons to his followers in each generation, calling them to stand before him fully present and attentive to the rule and realm of God brought near in each encounter with the neighbor.

Like the summoning bush of Moses, Jesus' searing presence calls forth without being consumed by the transcending nature of the call. He declares with that presence, "Here I am. Where are you?" He remains who he is, Jesus of Nazareth, even as he manifests to subsequent generations the fullness of the One who calls us out of ourselves into full and responsible engagement with every other...

The confessional task of letting Jesus be who and what he is remains a critical and a persisting concern. Jesus can never not be a Galilean Jew. But the temptation to leave him behind in pursuit of an ideologically configured Christ beckons to each generation that sets out to find him. The Aryan Jesus reminds us of what is at stake.

(h/t Paul Walton)

Just what was Handel on?

2009-06-15T07:59:00.006+01:00

Out in the car yesterday, I managed to catch, by pure fluke, a repeat of the best radio programme of the year so far — a quirky Radio 4 piece by the composer Jocelyn Pook, who compoased creepy atmospheric music for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, on the word Hallelujah. She considered its origins and inherent properties as a singing word, visited Jeremy Schonfeld, a Jewish Cantor and teacher from Cambridge, who sang a beautiful inpromptu Hebrew Psalm 117, before heading out through Leonard Coehn, to the Hallelujah Chorus, both in its original form and jazzed up excellently by a Gospel Choir from Tottenham.

“It means more than what you’re trying to say,” said one enthusiastic Gospel choir member. Leonard Cohen himself put in an appearance to talk about an 80’s working lunch in Paris with Bob Dylan, at which he told Dylan it had taken him two years to write ‘Hallelujah,’ although in fact, he confided to us, it had actually taken rather longer. Cohen then asked about his favourite spiritually loaded Dylan song, “I and I,” and Dylan revealed writing that had taken him... er, fifteen minutes. Don’t you just love it when that kind of thing happens to you?

She also discussed Handel’s alleged religious experience whilst composing the Hallelujah Chorus, where he was found by a servant in tears, having “seen the face of God.” Anyone who can copose two and a half hours of oratorio in three weeks must be on something interesting.

Whilst this was going on Pook composed for the programme a stunning atmospheric short piece of her own around the word “Hallelujah”, with strings and a female singer weaving music around the Cantor’s recitation of Psalm 117. The result, now available on iTunes, was rather magical — the kind of radio they only really do in the UK, as it is of zero commercial interest, but 100% soul food. God bless the BBC!

iPlayer users can catch the programme for a week here.

Shrinking the Footprint

2009-06-12T07:12:00.006+01:00

The Church environmental campaign (Website and resources here) held a launch day at Lambeth Palace, led by the Bishop of London and Joan Ruddock, UK Minister for Climate Change and Energy. People were there from every part of the country, with interesting local presentations from Exeter, Newcastle and London dioceses. This took me back to our various awareness raising sessions in the diocese in 2007, and reminded me how far we have to go.

It’s now over 30 years since the Lambeth Conference called for “Urgent and Instant Action” on this one. That call was followed by 20 years of doing almost nothing! These were the days of Mrs Thatcher, with her famous ignorance and antipathy about alternative energy. The outlook now is entirely different, as exactly the events the scientists indicated would happen are unfolding around us.

There has been real progress in the past 10 years, and scientific arguments which seemed so notional in 1978 is obvious and almost universally accepted now. This is a whole world issue — the UK only contributes 2% to the whole, but someone's got to give a lead. Copenhagen is absolutely crucial. To get it right world leaders need to pitch something real, but also doable. After years of childish denial and idiocy from US Governments, Obama is on the case, gathering the 16 nations who account for 80% of global emissions. This has to be encouraging.

People stick heads in the sand because they fear the consequences of confronting our fantasies about infinite growth and consumption, which has been the only show in town. Theologically, Christians have a rich tradition. It’s not just our measured pattern of feasting and fasting. There are big Scriptural concepts there — Shabat, Noachite Covenant, Shalom, Jubilee, Proportionality in reaping, Usury as a sin, Stewardship, and the vision of a whole earth groaining in futility for redemption. These are core messages of our theology, even if we’ve rather lost sight of some of them in the last century. It’s obviously time to focus on them again.

So what do we do? As well as joining anyone willing to come along on a public awareness changing exercise, the Carbon Trust, with whom the Church has been working closely, has developed a 5 Stage response model:

Mobilisation
Case for action
Opportunity assessment
Implementation Plan
Manage Implementation

We need to run several cycles of such processes at every level in our operations, building numbers of Eco-congregations, backing change in our schools (which account for a huge proportion of our emissions), managing buildings in new ways, changing our ways of life.. People need a bit of leadership and it’s all hands to the pump. Actually, there’s an immense amount of awareness and common sense in the UK about this, and the Climate Change Act was carried through with careful cross party preparation on the basis of common understanding.

We just have to get our rear ends into gear. The Enemy is Whinging Pom Cynicism, both corporate (“Anything that doesn’t solve the whole problem instantly is only a futile gesture so we’ll all have a good laugh at it”) and personal (“What I do doesn’t make a difference, so I think I’ll just carry on doing nothing”).

Pragmatically, the choices seem to be

Mitigate,
Adapt,
Suffer.

The fact is we will have to do some of all three. How much of each is, to a certain extent up to us. Inaction like that which followed the 1978 Lambeth Conference call for urgent action will not get anyone anywhere, and there is time to make up.

Evangelism: rewriting the Book

2009-06-10T12:38:00.005+01:00

Many thanks to Jonny Baker’s excellent Blog for news about this project by Improv Everywhere — possibly more of a set-up job than appears at first sight, but the gift to a random couple of an off-the-peg wedding reception for nothing, celebrated with enthusiastic strangers. It’s an interesting way of spreading Joy. To go out and enact what we believe it’s all about is surely the heart of mission? If we want to have a real impact on people’s lives in places like Milton Keynes, I wonder if this is the sort of thing we need to be doing, rather than sticking in buildings, flogging dead horses, or conventional “Come and get it” Evangelism?

BNP MEP’s: bring on the clowns?

2009-06-09T07:05:00.024+01:00

What about the BNP’s success in the Euro Elections? It’s a wakeup call for all “Hampstead Liberals” (pictured here on the BNP website). Christianity’s inherent Catholicity, an item in the Creed, flies in the face of the whole BNP deal. Their ideology contradicts a fundamental moral law — God hath made of one blood all nations upon earth. The Christian vision of heaven, all nations, kindreds and languages gathered together, is a good description of BNP hell — the last kind of place the BNP would want to wake up and find themselves.

In these terms perhaps the European Parliament could be one of the next most hellish experiences a BNP Man, like this young BNP organiser pictured to the Right, can have, this side of the grave. Our new model BNP MEP’s may just order in a crate of Watney’s Red Barrel and sit it out, or the interactions could be educatonal. We shall see.

They have much to learn. Take a statement of Nick Griffin’s:

From Northern Ireland to Bosnia to Rwanda, sooner or later the majority of multiracial, multicultural societies fall apart in bloodshed. There may be a few, like Singapore, where with an extremely authoritarian state it works for a while, but the lesson of history is that it tends not to.

One longs to shout out the obvious reply: “Nick, there is a nation of 300 million, the largest economy in the world, a global superpower that attributes its success to immigrants building a multiracial multicultural society. E Pluribus Unum. They think it works for them, and they haven’t done badly on it.”

But there’d be little point. BNP fascism only works on a gut level. Will Cuppy observed years ago, “Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood, and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.”

The excellent Channel 4/YouGov BNP Voting intentions analysis shows that, quoting Marx on Religion, BNP ideology is “the sighing of the oppressed creature” if not exactly the heart of a heartless world. People, mostly old style Labour voters, feel frustrated, disenfranchised, anxious and fearful. Fascist ideology, today as in the thirties, taps into anger and offers some kind of emotional release.

The disconnection of the Labour party from its own roots under Blair, Sun style pop Xenophobia, and disillusionment with parliamentarians, produced this result. Politicians must listen, not only pragmatically, but in a way that reconnects with this country’s historic Christian value base, or things can only get worse.

Finally, and this is cause for profound anxiety not complacency, we need to remember the BNP vote actually went down at this election. The BNP got in because Elections go on the proportion of votes cast. The Labour vote collapsed, and unprecedented numbers of voters stayed at home. The answer, as well perhaps as superficial solutions like Internet voting, is for our politicians to understand why, and address big issues about themselves, their values and their working practice. People look to their leaders to cast a vision, to enact compassion, to model Stability expressed in Christian values and so inspire trust and hope. If they’re not getting these things from the present lot, they will look elsewhere, even to clowns like the BNP.
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Time Marches on: 1612-1713

2009-06-08T08:31:00.010+01:00

The March of Time on Twitter strides boldly into the future, going where no one has gone before... to infinity and beyond. There are interesting milestones on the way. In May we did the 17th century:

19.04 (1611) — the King James Bible hits the news stands... Great Date for literary/ cultural as well as theological history, surely?

20.04 (1612) — Edward Wightman, a Baptist Minister, is last person in England to be burnt at the stake. March of Namby Pambly Liberals begins, as staking ceases. Also the year of the Northampton Witch trials - woman plus four executed by dunking for bewitching pigs. Pendle Witch trials later that year.  History doth not record whether bewitched pigs do that funny wiggle thing with their noses Samantha York used to do on TV, or fly.

21.04 (1619) — first meeting of Jamestown (Va) House of Burgesses (first representative assembly) of American colonies . First boatload of black indentured laborers delivered to America by Captain Jope, to be traded for food and supplies :-(

22.04 (1624) Oops! Oslo and Dunfermline burn down. Versailles started, as Cardinal Richelieu joins Louis XIV's government

23.04 (1638) world’s first movable type newspaper in Beijing; Swedes make Peace of Hamburg with French and found "New Sweden" in Delaware.  We, the last generation to bother with movable type newspapers salute the pluck Ming Dynasty for the Beijing Gazette of 1638!

24.04 (1647) Civil War starts up again Parliamentarians raze Aberystwyth Castle, and ban Christmas. Lord Rochester the Restoration Rake born...  (3 R’s?) Also in 1647, Dutch West India Co appoint Peter Stuyvesant Governor of New Amsterdam (> NY): Face that launched a million Cancer Sticks . Also, Rhode Island separate Church and State: Humans get the State and Poultry the Church?

25.04 (1672) Synod of Jerusalem: Orthodox response to challenges raised by Western Protestantism. In UK Charles II Declaration of Indulgence tolerates Protestants along with booze, chocs & floozies: Parliament not impressed . Meanwhile in Dutch "rampjaar" of 1672 everyone, for different reasons decides to invade Holland simultaneously. Just one of those things. They got over it.

26.04 (1688) The Glorious Revolution — incl. Very exciting Battle of Reading where Dutch whupped the Irish. James II ran away soon after... not everyone realises there was a glorious revolution in England. King loses Crown, both literally and metaphorically. Subsequently English Monarchy goes Dutch, with William & Mary. Also in 1688, Turks besiege Vienna, & Edward Lloyd goes into Insurance business.

27.04 (1690) Battle of the Boyne consolidates William III's position. The Pope was actually on the Dutch Protestant side, (Anti-French League of Augsburg).  Also new in 1690 — Clarinet (Nürnberg), American Paper Money (Massachussetts), and the Planet Uranus (Titter ye not) sighted by John Flamsteed

28.04 (1700) What d/you get man with everything? Louis XIV gets Spanish Crown for nephew Philippe & triggers War of the Spanish Succession. Oops! Messy!

29.04 (1708) Queen Anne refuses to sign Scottish Militia Bill - last time a monarch witholds Royal Assent. J. S. Bach gets a job in Weimar...

30.04 (1713) Treaty of Utrecht ends war of Spanish Succession; Philip d'Anjou gets Spain. British get Gibraltar & Menorca. Monkeys delighted...

Wordle: Bit of innocent fun

2009-06-07T13:48:00.008+01:00

This here’s a Wordle of the front page of this blog. It’s a kind of designer word cloud, artistically arranged, for which you can set colours and fonts. It gives you some idea of the contents on a stream-of-consciousness level.

Wordles are surprisingly engaging electronic playthings. Here’s another:More details and the opportunity to produce your own from any text you like, or blog, here.

Many thanks to Rev John Griffiths for pointing out how brilliantly wordles represent visually what our sermons were actually all about: He gives a link to one of his in the comments below, and I tried mine from yesterday morning (Trinity Sunday & Father's Day):

Europe: worth a few straight bananas

2009-06-06T08:16:00.019+01:00

Awaiting European election results, Lucy and I popped over for a look at the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker, now open to the public. For 20 years up to 1992 it was a regional government centre; a hidey hole from which a commissioner and 600 Civil Servants would have run a great chunk of Britain after the Bomb went off. Authentic Public Information films from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s play as you go round.

Stentorian government announcers explain how to protect and survive with bin liners, 35 milk bottles of water each, a sand tray and a central core or refuge under the kitchen table. They all assume one bomb somewhere with two weeks to recover, and we can only wonder at how we’d have died, the lot of us, if these devices had gone off in any number. They’re also rather coy about what you do when the fallout from your own nukes blows back across the channel and kills you anyway.
Yet for much of my lifetime that was the plan — hold the Russians on Lüneborg Heath for up to a fortnight, then go nuclear.

Some of us well remember the Cuban missile crisis — thinking war could happen, with some childish notion it would be a bit like the blitz. These films make it plain it would be like nothing of the sort.
A small amount of imagination makes it obvious this whole nuclear survival thing was and is a bunch of crap. Even with a backyard the size of Siberia (or Alaska) it's a complete hiding to nowhere.

When I was a nipper in 1962 a teacher told me there would probably be a third world war by 1970, as there had been one every 25 years of that century so far. That’s what she had experienced, anyway. The European Union may not have acheved straight bananas, but it has broken a sequnce of bloody European wars which ran for 300 years like sick clockwork, (1700+/ 1750+/ 1790+/ 1848/ 1870/ 1914/ 1939). NATO has provided a defence umbrella, but positively speaking, the EU has built a continent where a war between its historic nations is now, for the first time in 300 years, unthinkable. Its processees could doubtless be reformed in sensible ways, but the central achievement is that for the first time in 300 years, two generations, mine and my children’s, didn’t have to march off to a major war.

I’m less than impressed by anyone who is prepared to risk dismantling Europe, or reducing it to a mere trading arrangement.

The great failure of the League of Nations in the 1930’s was its inability to construct union at a deep enough level to prevent war between nation states in 1939.
It broke under stress precisely because it could develop no substantial common institutions.

To be a Little Englander you have to be too stupid, ignorant or unimaginative to understand the most basic fact of our contemporary history. In a world of globalised superpowers, Victorian nation states are ultimately roadkill; and if anyone were to let off a nuke the other side of the channel, we’d be killed by the fallout anyway within hours. Why wouldn’t we want to play a positive role in the mechanism for preventing that ever happening?

Load of Old Bullocks

2009-06-05T09:15:00.008+01:00

Lucy and I went out recently to check the newly opened Cellars at Hughenden House, and encountered a slightly odd phenomenon in the car park. A gaggle of Bullocks clustered around the (hot) cars, some climbing up onto them and licking the windscreens and lights, even with people in the cars. One or two had broken wing mirrors and wipers.

Has anyone else ever seen bullocks doing this? Why? Is this some kind of Bovine Kinky thing? Are they after the satnavs? or what?

Answers on a postcard...