Storyteller’s World

It was an interesting Christmas for the Family. Last year the thing that stuck in my memory was a degree of tension and argument. Different family members were going through various stressful times just then - including me - and we weren’t always as good for each other as every family hopes it will be.

But this year was altogether better, and I think it came from simply spending a bit more time with each other, and putting some effort into it. Instead of living like hermits in our own individual cells, and only coming together to eat and wash up (OK, I know real hermits might come together to pray as well…) we even played games together, something which I don’t remember doing since the long-ago days of children’s board games when they were about 10. This year we all played Cranium, in which there should have been some advantage in me and Alison forming a team together, but in this case the old marital telepathy didn’t work because other couples could hum louder and hear better than we could. (You may not understand this unless you’ve played the game.) In fact the better advantage of being in the same team was not needing to compete with each other - and we are competitive! - and not needing to win against the children any more, which gave them full scope for their own competitiveness. So a good time was had by all.

We also saw all the children’s ‘other halves’ for longer than we have done before, mostly; and this was a real joy. I’m not good at getting to know people by the ‘interview technique’ at the best of times, and have always shrunk from doing that to girl- or boyfriends who are brought home - it just smacks too much of the Victorian father. So there’s really no alternative to just spending time together - maybe even over a game of Cranium. All our children have chosen well about who they want to spend their time with. I’m very pleased about that, even though it’s no more than I would have hoped and expected.

More of us were able to go to Mum and Dad’s for the family gathering that looks the other way, towards the older generation. And that was a joy for them too, at a time when life is getting harder, and with fewer joys, much of the rest of the time.

Taking a few days away from Internet access, starting tomorrow. Taking the laptop with me, but not the Broadband access, so unless a neighbour in the flats has unpadlocked wifi facility I can plug into without them noticing, there’ll be no way of blogging. Back again at New Year!

It can be hard to predict what sort of congregations you might get at Christmas. Even from one year to the next, circumstances change, and I’m guessing whether that has to do with the day of the week on which Christmas Day falls, or with whether the parish is one that people come to or leave, for the Christmas holidays. Up till now, it’s been a parish that people return to; is it possible for it to change from one year to the next, like the axis of a planet, or its magnetic poles, suddenly shifting?

Our main service attendances went something like this:

Family Carol Service on Christmas Eve (for several years this has been the best attended service): must have been about 300 in church. People sitting everywhere, extra chairs out, sitting on the altar steps, several having to stand.

Junior Church Nativity at Parish Communion on the Sunday before Christmas (150? This is what counts as a very full church, normally.)

Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, December 19. Not even quite full. (140?)

Midnight Mass. Strangest service of the year: more people there that I don’t know than any other service, and about a quarter of them not receiving Communion. (100?)

Christmas Day Family Communion. About 90 there? slightly fewer than on a regular Sunday?

St Stephen, Parish Communion. Only about 50 there, and a surprising selection of the young families. Many of the older members, grandparents etc., must have gone away to family, leaving those households too large to go away to stay. But then for most of them it would have been three days in a row of going to church, which is a tall order.

And then there were some smaller services too: the 8 o’clocks and BCPs of this season.

(While at Elsfield for Communion on Christmas Day, we were pleased to have a congregation of 12.)

Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots has some interesting things to say about the dead end that modern storytelling reached in the 20th century. He quotes Samuel Beckett:

We have nothing to say, except that we have nothing to say.

Ad Reinhardt, the American abstract impressionist who produced a painting that was just a black canvas:

An artist … has always nothing to say and he must say it over and over again.

And refers to composer John Cage’s work ‘4.33′ which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

In contrast to this sense of speechlessness, in the face of the void of meaning that has opened up before our feet, we who celebrate Christmas affirm that the Word has come into the world. Speech is valid, because God has spoken. And in so far as we speak words that are within that Word, or in harmony with it, our human words are also meaningful. Putting words together is an occupation that makes sense, that is worth doing. This is why we tell stories, and why it is important that the stories we tell are within the Tradition, rather than some of the aberrations that Booker describes, which appear to follow the form of the Story but ‘lose the plot’ in some way and thus fail to fulfil the true purpose of Story.

A Happy Christmas to all lovers of the Word; and here’s to many more words (within the Word, and in harmony with him) in the coming year.

At the school where Sun teaches RE, she has gained herself enormous admiration from her class for pointing them the way to the Hero Machine which I mentioned in my Superhero Vicar post. After she devised a persona for herself, they all wanted to do the same. She hadn’t remembered the URL, so the only way she could find her way there was via the post on my blog. So now I bask in reflected glory too: “Wow, miss! Your dad! He must be well cool!”

Harriet Hitchcock and the Stolen ChristChild was the story I told on Christmas Eve some years back, prefiguring all this spate of thefts from Christmas Cribs that is now happening in the so-called real world.

For Top 5 in 2004:

1. The Seal of the Blog
2. A Parliament of Rooks
3. The Wind-Singer
4. Technology and the Elderly
5. St Pelagius

But more visited than any of these were my pages:

Reconsidering the Rosary

What’s in your computer?

BBC NEWS | England | London | One dead after stabbing rampage

I’m pretty shaken up about this news story, as I grew up all around these streets, went to school only about half a mile from Edmonton Green, and lived for 20 years in Empire Avenue, where it seems one of the attacks took place. Even though it’s nearly 35 years ago, it still feels very much like ‘my country’.

Fortunately we haven’t had the spate of funerals here, that some of our neighbours in blogworld and in real geography have had. So I’ve been able to keep my head down a bit and get on with the normal stuff:

• Going to Sainsbury’s to stock up with all the provisions every family needs for Christmas
• Preparing what to say at the services still to come
• Starting to book in the funerals that are already lining up for the New Year. Local funeral directors are now booking for the first and second weeks in January
• Being woken by the doorbell at 6 this morning, to find on the doorstep a woman who let herself out of the Warneford last night, having realised she had human rights and decided to stop taking her lithium, had spent the whole night walking around the city, and was cold and soaking wet, and therefore just about impossible to shut the door on. I’m not good at this kind of situation (fortunately it doesn’t happen very often) as I very quickly start thinking about my human rights to not be woken up by people like this in the night.

So: yes, busy enough, thanks.

In the interests of free inquiry, I googled poteen and found Knockeen Hills Irish Poteen

I especially treasure, ‘Butler’s Irish Book published in 1660 claimed that ‘it enlighteneth ye heart, casts off melancholy, keeps back old age and breaketh ye wind’.’ Yes, I think I could do with some of that.

I caught a bit of this on Radio 4 yesterday: stuff I had never known about the distilling of illicit liquor in Scotland and Ireland, moonshine and poteen. Who says it was illicit? The Government, of course, who turned it into a source of income by taxing it, and centralising the ‘legal’ distilling into the hands of big industrial distillers, who naturally became enormously wealthy. And then having to employ armies of excise men, often with troops to back them up, to enforce the whole thing. Before that, it had been a local, cottage industry, a normal and necessary part of the agricultural economy of poor regions of those Celtic fringes. So the English Government effectively criminalised much of the Highland and Irish population in the 18th century.

And why did they need the money? To pay for their wars, of course. We naturally had to pay through the nose, to make sure the nasty French Revolution didn’t spill over onto this side of the Channel.

I don’t remember any of this being part of the history we were taught at school. But then, it wouldn’t be, would it?

From today’s Church Times:

A report that ‘Historic churches in need of repair could be at great risk because the nation’s heritage is too dependent on the Heritage Lottery Fund’, which is fed by the National Lottery, that well-known stealth tax on the poor. The Government is failing in its responsibility to do anything for this part of our heritage, and looking to the poor to bail them out instead.

On the very next page, new research suggests that ‘Christmas and weekend working is seriously damaging family life, especially among the poor’. Is this any surprise? Again, the Church said it would be the poorest who would suffer. But Government and Business didn’t listen. The Church may at times have been among those who oppressed the poor; but it also has an honourable history of being one of the few consistent voices to speak for them. Let’s ordain a few more Robin Hoods. Or better still, elect them to Parliament instead of the ersatz-Socialists in office at present.

See the Keep Time for Children campaign.

So the Sikh protesters in Birmingham got their way, and succeeded in forcing a theatre to close a play they took exception to. This is a sad day for religious understanding, because it gives aid and comfort to the bigots and extremists, and encourages them to believe that the use of force will win them what they want. What Sikhs are seen to have achieved, perhaps Muslims, Jews, even Christians, will try next. And creative artists are gagged, prevented from doing what they do, prevented from using the gifts God has given them.

What was it the Sikhs objected to? What was it they could not accept? Do they really think it is impossible for sexual abuse to take place within the context of their religion? If they do, they’re deluding themselves. Religious power can be just as corrupt and corrupting as any other sort of power; hence all the more reason to watch it carefully, and expose its misuse. Or did they hate it that a fellow-Sikh - a woman at that - was exposing the possibility of such abuse? That makes you want to question all the gender implications behind their protest, too.

Any way you look at it, it sets truth back a long way. And any religion that isn’t on the side of truth, isn’t worth the name of religion.

In our family story, it’s not so much that either yesterday or today is the shortest day, as that (certainly in Alison’s memory) last night is the Longest Night. For, 27 years ago, she was in labour with Tom, and spent the whole night and most of the following day on the delivery bed in Dryburn Hospital. Tom takes after his dad in having a Very Big Head, so it was not a comfortable experience. It was a memorable Christmas, because back then (it sounds like the dark ages) the hospital’s practice was to keep mums in for a full week after having a baby, so they spent Christmas in maternity, while dad and granny were allowed in for two hours a day at visiting time. They were allowed out of bed, unlike some earlier generations! Alison came home talking to baby like a proper Wearside mum; apparently I became so exasperated at some point that I said, “If you call that baby ‘pet’ once more, I shall …” (I can’t actually remember the outburst; neither of us can remember the threat; actually I think ‘pet’ is quite sweet, now; but at the time it was all a bit much.)

Today Tom is 27, and this is the first time in all those years he is not at home for his actual birthday. This is also a part of the archetypal Story of every family.

So have a good day, mate.

Among the more annoying things in life, is when you write a letter (or e-mail) of complaint when you’re still feeling pretty grumpy, and you get a swift and polite response. This just happened when I tried to visit the English Heritage website, and got the error message: ‘You have been redirected to the accessible version of the site as you are using a browser that is not currently supported on the graphics site.’ Since I’m using Firefox, probably the most advanced, secure and standards compliant browser there is, I was a bit miffed, especially as I guessed this meant they catered chiefly for Internet Explorer (which is all the opposites: backward, insecure, and non-standards compliant.)

The swift and polite response?

It has been with some regret that the website has not been Firefox compatible as well as a number of other browsers. We in the web team understand the importance of giving visitors an option. We felt that there were a number of changes to make to the website that were more cost effective to be done together. We were not able to sort this out without some investment.

We are pleased to say that we have succeeded in pushing through the necessary changes within the organisation and are in the process of completely restructuring our site architecture and migrating our content to a more powerful and accessible content management system which accepts all standards compliant browsers. This has had a slight delay on the improvements necessary on our site. However, these changes will hopefully be fully implemented by the New Year.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Mind you, I still think they’re wrong even to be going down that road as a temporary measure.

Today, a visit to my mother-in-law. This is not meant to introduce any inappropriate jokes! Whenever Marjorie phones and I pick it up, she says, “Hello, this is your mother-in-law.” According to the AA Routeplanner, the best route from Oxford to Sherborne is down the A34 and then along the A303 as far as Wincanton, then a short cut across minor roads via Charlton Horethorn. It was a horrid day for driving, grey and dull and miserable; though at this time of year that may not be as bad as bright low sunshine. But the A303 took us right past Stonehenge, so on this shortest day of the year, we actually saw the place of pilgrimage for many. Sure enough, there were quantities of visitors around the site and caravans and campers parked nearby. I wonder if there is a solstice ritual, or whether people stand and think their own thoughts, or dance in patterns around the stones? Is there a Stonehenge equivalent of the C of E’s Liturgical Commission? Are there internecine squabbles between traditionalists and innovators? I say we need to know.

This picture of Mum and Dad, taken by Jan when she was over here back in September.

Alison’s colleague Bill has given her a little book which should definitely come with a health warning for all spouses, partners and Significant Others, who run a serious risk of needing to muzzle the person who wants to read these out loud to them. The Little Book of Complete Bollocks is a spoof on all self-help books, but it’s so amusing that it will also do you a lot more good than a whole shelf-full of the real thing.

Example:

FINDING OUT WHO YOU ARE

The best way to find out who you are
is to go up to somebody who knows who you are
and say, ‘Hello, who am I?’

Looking at your name in a driving licence or passport
is another useful way of finding out who you are.

It reminds me of the story I loved about President Reagan visiting an old folks’ home, and trying to cheer up one of the residents by making it quite clear to her what an honour it was to be visited by the Pres.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“No dear,” she replied. “But if you ask one of these nice nurses, I’m sure she’ll be able to remind you.”

This is definitely a milestone I’d rather not pass. Somewhere out there among the servers of this dark world, my little blog has attracted the attention of someone who, for some reason known only to him (well, it probably is a him), thinks it’s amusing to send spam comments to people’s blogs. Can anyone offer advice, consolation, explanation, or especially tips on how to avoid this, that don’t involve the tedious process of manually deleting every offending comment?

Comments from other WordPress users will be especially welcome!

I always think December is a particularly bad time of the year to write these darn things anyway. What with the seasonal depressiveness, and the busy-ness of everything that has to be done, I have this recurring terror that I will forget and leave out some really important event of the year, some major birth or death.

I just realised what I left out this year was any mention of Alison and me celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary back in March. This is the kind of thing that could necessitate a lot of excuse-making, and the only thing I think will save the day is the fact that, when she thought back over the year, she forgot it too.

This reminds you of that daft old joke that goes:

A: So-and-so has found Jesus.

B: I didn’t even know he was missing.

Apparently Baby Jesus is getting stolen all the time, and not only in Harriet Hitchcock stories. Or is it chiefly an American phenomenon, connected to their greater piety or religiosity over there?

Why do I even bother to read the Sunday paper? Well, it could be that after preaching or taking the morning service, I’m just too whacked to do anything else. Maybe I need a bit of depressing after the ‘high’ of worship. Or maybe, subconsciously, I look there for a reminder that in our little corner of the religious universe, we’re really not doing all that badly after all. We actually are trying to preach and live a message that God is all about the blessing and affirming of life, that that includes everyone, that Christ’s way of love involves not hating or killing the people we disagree with.

Today’s gleanings from the news include 400 Sikhs attacking a theatre in Birmingham, in protest against a play depicting sexual abuse and murder in a Sikh temple. Heavens! if mobs of Christians went on the rampage every time something offensive to Christianity was portrayed in drama, every time the priest or vicar-character was a sex abuser or killer, there wouldn’t be any actors, theatres or broadcasting centres left.

In Iran, two women are to be executed for adultery, one of them with a mental age of 8, who has been forced into prostitution by her own mother, since she was a child. Apparently adultery is something you can commit on your own in some cultures, for you rarely read of men being executed for their involvement. (One such case is mentioned here, but it’s a boy of 17. He’s only just old enough to face the death penalty, which in Iran is 15. For boys. For girls it’s 9.) I wonder whether some people who perpetrate such acts in the name of God have ever stopped to think about the God they claim to believe in. But I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

Oh, yes. Christians don’t get off entirely blameless. Apparently ‘Christian groups’ are up in arms about a proposed Channel 4 documentary about the Bible, which suggests that it’s not entirely true. Whatever that means. I supposed it’s going to be revealed to us that the 5 Books of Moses were not all written by Moses. I don’t know which is more depressing about this story. The level of ignorance among journalists, if they think this is news. Or the stupidity of the ‘Christian groups’ that so predictably rise to the bait.

Religion’s got a hell of a lot to answer for, hasn’t it?

Then at last: oh joy and gospel! Our own Bishop, Richard Harries, writes that ‘We should not fear religion‘. Not only has it become, and will continue to be, a major factor in world events; it can also be part of the solution instead of part of the problem, if religious leaders are involved in peacemaking efforts. It’s a pretty big ‘if’ when you think of the Ian Paisleys of this world. But that’s all the more reason for the moderates, and those who really know and love God - more than their religion! - to stand up and be counted.

I’ve only been there twice, and each time I only visited Atlanta Hartsfield airport, from where I travelled to Simpsonwood Conference Centre for the annual gathering of NOBS: the Network of Biblical Storytellers. It seems a bit of a waste, but I didn’t feel I had the time or the finances to extend my stay beyond those precious couple of days. So, I’m not exactly qualified to speak of the USA.

Yet it fascinates, compels and repels. Sometimes I wonder if America and Americans are on the same planet as the rest of us. Their life and ways are so much a part of all of us, thanks to their media, films, TV and policies, that we all feel they belong to us and shape us. They even speak our language: or it might be more accurate to say, we speak theirs. They had the revolution we never managed to have, and yet they have become a far more conservative people than we have been, for many a year (if ever).

Most amazingly, Americans are comfortable talking about God - even on the Internet! - at the same time as insisting on this radical separation of Church and State. While we Brits, with our ‘Established Church’, find ourselves an embattled and embittered minority in an increasingly, radically, secular culture. Where, for absurd example, our second city apparently decided not to have Santa’s Grotto in its shopping centres, for fear of offending non-Christians. (Christians, of course, have never been offended by Santa Claus being regarded as a central part of the Christian message of Christmas )

Has anybody got a clue how to understand any of this? Americans sometimes wonder why the rest of the world hates them so much. I don’t know whether it’s always hate, so much as envy, exasperation, but mostly just downright bafflement.

Now spammers have started to rebuke me for daring to consider their offerings as spam!

A ‘Christian cyber-tract’ I received this morning included these admonitory words:

Under Bill s.1618 TITLE III passed by the 105th U.S. Congress, as long as Contact Information and information for removal are included,this letter cannot be considered Spam.

This message is in compliance with U.S. Federal requirements for commercial email and cannot be considered SPAM since it includes a remove mechanism.

Well, I’m sorry US Congress, and my spamming Christian friend, but I’m the one who decides what I consider spam. You don’t like it? So arrest me.

Today we decorated the church for Christmas. This means hanging up all the candle-holders that have been decked with yew and holly, so that there is enough candlelight for those two magical carol services when we pretend that we live in a world without electricity. (Except to power the organ, of course: little boys are not the expert organ pumpers that they used to be. Probably in the days when they also climbed chimneys and swept them for a living.) This decorating takes a team of mostly our retired men and women a whole morning, not counting the preliminary hanging of hooks and chains, and cutting greenery.

Now it’s done; and going along to church for Evening Prayer reminded me suddenly of a Christmas Eve when I was quite new here. Before we had the secure door locks, CCTV cameras and security lights. I strode up to the church door, turned the porch lights on and went in - to find two men standing there in the dark.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked.

“Looking for the times of the Christmas services,” said they.

“What, in the dark?”

I don’t remember what their answer to that was. So, in all innocence, I told them when the services were going to be: Carol Service, Midnight Mass. And they disappeared pretty swiftly.

It was only then I discovered they had, in fact, been trying to break into the vestry. I wondered whether, if I had been more confrontational and challenging, I might have got a knife between the ribs or a bat round the head. But here’s the thing. There in the dark building, they had been lighting match after match while they tried to prize open the vestry door. All the while, in a room packed with candles. They only had to help themselves to one or two, and they would have had light and to spare.

It’s always seemed to me a good illustration of our natural state. We spend our lives trying to strike matches, that shed oh, so little light, when all the while we’re surrounded by the potential for light, and vision, that God has just left lying around the place for us.

According to the BBC news site, users of Microsoft Windows may have to pay for a utility that keeps their computers free of spyware:
BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft sets sights on spyware.

Surveys show that almost every Windows PC is infested with spyware programs that do everything from bombard users with adverts to steal login data.

So it’s not enough that the OS is overpriced and so insecure that users are vulnerable to these invasions in the first place. Now we have to pay the people who made it that way, to be protected from their mistakes. Doesn’t anyone else think this stinks?

(continued …)

Huge numbers of Christmas cards being sent to distant friends’ and relatives’ former addresses, because you can’t remember which is the latest version of your electronic database, or your HDD was wiped out some time during the year, and you’ve restored it from the wrong backed-up version, or you put the wrong CD-ROM in the drive.

How many beautiful friendships may perish prematurely because of people losing contact this way, as a result of some virus or other computer misfortune? Their full tale may never be told.

This never used to happen with Filofax!

Roy Hattersley has some wise things to say in the Gauradian (whoops, I’m doing it too) about the Fall of Blunkett: It’s a personal tragedy - but far from a political one.

He also talks about the hypocritical censoriousness of many, not just in the media:

On the evening of the first revelation, I travelled north in a railway carriage which was crowded with censorious businessmen. I asked them how many company directors would feel that behaviour of the sort of which the home secretary was accused required their resignation. They had the grace to agree that outside Whitehall and Westminster, what Mr Blunkett was alleged to have done would be regarded as a matter of no consequence.

Sure, I know that we are not to cast stones, and none of us - not even, or especially not, clergy - is as good as we would like, or make out to be. But that’s not a good enough reason to accept adultery as normal or of no consequence in our society. Ask the betrayed women or men, often left marginalised in society, struggling to keep the rest of their family together.

I always feel strangely cheered up when the 17th morning of the month comes round, and we get to say Psalm 88. As far as I can recall, this is the only psalm which is just about unremittingly miserable and wretched. Most of the other lament psalms have a kind of up-turn or resolution at the end; psalm 88 doesn’t. There is no resolution; the psalmist still ends in desolation, with “My lovers and friends hast thou put away from me: and hid mine acquaintance out of my sight.”

I don’t know why I find this encouraging. Perhaps it’s that others have felt like this: much worse than I usually do. That it gives us permission to feel abandoned by God, sometimes just kicked in the teeth. That it’s possible to feel like this and still to pray. That it’s just there in the scriptures. This makes me sure the words of scripture are honest words, words that you can trust.

I just found out where you can get hold of different stylesheets and designs for WordPress. This one comes from Viewfinder Design. It’s - um - different from what it looked like yesterday. I’d still prefer to have time to pore over the templates and CSS files and work out how to do it myself. Maybe in those long, idle days after Christmas and the New Year, when nothing’s stirring.

Picked this meme up at Marsha Hamilton’s place.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

After a stanza break this metre stops and another starts.

Frankly, I’m disappointed. But it was the first book I touched when I reached out to my right. And sadly, it turns out to be ‘The Real Common Worship’, ed. Peter Mullens. I’m slightly embarrassed to let on that I own this, never mind that it was nearest to hand …

Our best-attended service over Christmas in recent years, has been the Family Carol Service on Christmas Eve. The churchwarden reckoned one year that he counted 300 people there, but I don’t think that’s physically possible in our building. Still, lots of people, you get the idea.

The Family Carol Service is a cut-down version of the Nine Lessons and Carols, with just five readings, congregational carols only (too many of the choir have gone off by then), and an all-age story. In recent years the tradition has grown up that this will be a Harriet Hitchcock story. Harriet Hitchcock is the woodland private detective and special investigator. A sort of hedgehog version of Miss Marple: spikier and less irritatingly middle-class than Agatha Christie’s sleuth. The titles tell their own story:

• Harriet Hitchcock and the Year They Tried To Stop Christmas
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Christmas Baby
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Santa Claus Kidnap
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Christmas Turkey (this didn’t go down well with the vegetarians, since the turkey that Harriet’s friends ‘liberated’ from the vicarage, where he was destined for Christmas dinner, demanded in no uncertain terms to be unliberated again. This was what he, the Prince of Turkeys, was born and bred for! And he was last seen returning to the vicarage saying something about, It was a far, far better thing that he did, than he had ever done; it was a far, far better rest, that he went to, than he had ever known.)
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Stolen Christ-Child
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Stage-frightened Donkey
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Unclaimed Christmas Present
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Unexpected Baby
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Angel Who Fell Off The Back Of A Lorry
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Crow Brothers’ Return
• Harriet Hitchcock and the Fox Who Fell To Earth

A major part of the pre-Christmas anxiety each year has become the question: Will I be able to think of another, new story this year? Sometimes it gets almost to Christmas Eve and nothing has come … and then suddenly it’s there. The Holy Spirit hasn’t failed yet. (Thank you, God!) So it’s with a sense of jubilation (and relief) that I can report: That moment happened today. It’s a wonderful thing, when you feel a story coming on. In the case of Harriet Hitchcock, there are so many characters and situations already ‘there’ that it’s like meeting old friends.

So, the Churchwarden’s Dream concerns Colonel Winstanley Balderdash, who this year decides he can’t allow the vicar to put up the traditional Holzbein Crib (medieval, German, no one knows just how it came to be in the possession of this little English parish church), because it’s priceless, uninsurable, irreplaceable, and crooks keep trying to steal it. (See earlier stories.) The vicar is distraught, but too meek and mild to withstand his determined churchwarden. The colonel’s parrot (Napoleon Bonaparrot, central figure of the Whitsuntide story, Harriet Hitchcock and the Holy Parakeet) flies off and alerts Harriet and her assistant Popgoes (who is a reformed weasel). The animals plan how to put things right, and that night they appear to the churchwarden in a ghostly dream visitation, as the Ghost of It Is Christmas, Jim, But Not As We Know It. Weeping children and hysterical mothers blame their inconsolable grief on the churchwarden. The spectre of Hieronymus Holzbein, who vowed in his lifetime that every year his Crib would bring pleasure to children, threatens to haunt, for a year and a day, the person who has thwarted his vow. The Christkindl hovers in mid-air, saying he is God’s greatest gift to the world, and anyone who receives the gift, and truly loves him, will certainly want everyone else to receive the gift. The stricken colonel rushes round to the vicarage at first light and recounts his dream to the vicar, insisting that they must put up the Crib without delay. “But what about the insurance?” “Hang the insurance!” cries the colonel. “If needs be, I’ll stand guard day and night to make sure everyone sees the Crib and gets the message about God’s greatest gift to the world!”

Yes, I think that’ll do nicely, when it’s polished up a bit.

You leave Government with your integrity intact and your achievements acknowledged by all. You are a force for good in British politics and can take great pride in what you have done to improve the lives of people in this country. And that is what we are in politics for.

Thus Tony Blair in his letter accepting David Blunkett’s resignation. I can understand that the PM needs to say nice things to someone he is apparently reluctant to lose from the Cabinet. What makes me angry is that he still hasn’t got it. He still doesn’t understand why republican virtues matter. The virtues that hold that there is no distinction between private and public, that the ‘private’ lives of politicians do matter, that if they betray faithfulness and integrity in private, they cannot and should not be trusted not to do the same in public. Hence you get the bare-faced hypocrisy of the leaked e-mail (whether or not it came from Blunkett): ‘No favours, but slightly quicker.’ Yes, it may only be a piddling little thing, compared with the potential threat to human rights represented by introduction of ID cards, and the suspension of habeas corpus. It’s still got to be nipped in the bud, before the gangrene infects the whole body.

fun n. 1 light-hearted pleasure or amusement
2 a source of this
3 playfulness or good humour: she’s full of fun

PHRASES in fun not intended seriously. make fun of tease or laugh at in a mocking or unkind way
ORIGIN C17 (denoting a trick or hoax): from obs. fun ‘to cheat or hoax’, dial. var. of ME fon ‘make a fool of, be a fool’, rel. to fon ‘a fool’, of unknown origin.

maggi dawn gives us a timely reminder of the fact that Christmas can be a depressing time for many people. They feel bad because the culture suggests everybody’s having fun, and if you’re not there’s something the matter with you. And of course, what with the expectation and the pressures and real life and relationships being what they are, there can easily be a sense of disappointed let-down.

But even the dictionary definition suggests that ‘fun’ is a cheat. And that it is not something you can just have, but something you have to make or do. It’s kind of analogous to another word of one syllable beginning with an f and a u. If all you’re interested in is what you get out of it, it’s going to be a disaster and a cheap (or possibly expensive) disappointment. But if your concern is to give pleasure to someone else, there’s a good chance that you will receive even better than you give.

So my Christmas resolution is not to try to have fun this Christmas. But to try to be fun, to create fun, to give it to others.

I don’t have a works Christmas outing as such, on the basis that I’m the only one who works here anyway (and then, only one day a week). But I do get invited to a few Christmas events run by other groups. So far this year I’ve managed to eat steak at one of those, and venison at a second (with spatchcocked quail, to boot). Today’s do, the Christmas lunch of the excellent Donnington Doorstep Family Centre, involved the first turkey of this Christmas season.

Last night, the genteel surroundings of academe, at Kellogg College; today, the child-noisy environment and child-sized furniture of Donnington Doorstep. The neighbour at one of these was the leading expert on the history of British colonialism in Kenya, and John Buchan’s time in South Africa. The neighbour at the other was a two-year old who spent 6 months in hospital as a baby, and still shrinks from the noise of other babies’ distress, needing comfort and reassurance from mum. You can’t use the same conversational gambits, somehow.

With the news that David Blunkett has quit as home secretary, Labour has got rid of one its liabilities. Now it only needs the PM himself to resign before the election, and maybe they have the chance of a third term - and possibly even a Labour Government.

Please, please, please don’t bring me any of those ghastly ‘Christmas gift’ books that blight the booksellers’ shelves at this time of year.

I mean, I can understand that people envy the J.K.Rowlings, Lynne Trusses and Ben Schotts of this world, and hate it that they got lucky when we didn’t, and want to imitate them and cash in on their success. But all those parodies and crude appeals to the worst and most tasteless side of our nature, make me despair of human creativity. It’s like selling our creative gifts like cheap trash.

And even the ones that aren’t parodies, leave an unpleasant taste. I see Simon Hoggart has brought out a curmudgeon’s guide to Christmas round robin letters, as he calls it, entitled The Cat That Could Open the Fridge. It’s easy to make fun of these relatively harmless Christmas habits and customs. But isn’t it better to have some news of people you’ve known and loved, but life has taken you miles apart, rather than none, or losing touch completely? I know a lot of them (nearly all of them) are not great literature. Most of them would be improved if their authors blogged regularly, instead of doing what amounts to a once-a-year snail-mail kind of alternative to a blog. I don’t always read or remember most of the ones we get. And yes, I’m a perpetrator of a Christmas round robin letter - though mine, of course, is a work of literature.

But, whatever their bad points, I truly think they should be kept and archived as a social history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They are a picture of How We Live Now. They will probably be a darn sight more useful to future historians, than the ghastly parodies and Christmas dross that get published, bought, given and junked or remaindered. I genuinely hope so, anyway.

I quite thought there would be carol singing this evening at the Kellogg College Christmas Party. But not so. In past years we have sung carols at this event - sometimes the words have been downloaded off the Internet, which usually yields weird and wonderful American tunes - I did not know they sing traditional carols to strange different tunes in the USA - but since last Christmas the accompanist has died, so it was necessary to do things differently this year. Instead there was a ‘panto’ whose humour would mean more to an Oxford academic than to me, and a group of young vocalists called the Celestial Singers, singing some suitable pieces.

The menu for tonight’s feast included: Spatchcocked quail with a pomegranate and ginger salad. I have never been spatchcocked, and never hope to be. It sounds extremely painful; and this is confirmed by the Concise OED which has this entry:

spatchcock n. a chicken or game bird split open and grilled.
v. 1. prepare (a poultry or game bird) in this way
2. (informal, chiefly Brit.) add (a phrase, sentence, etc.) in a context where it is inappropriate.

Kellogg College has received generous benefactions from the Kellogg Foundation. There seemed to be some suggestion tonight that they might sub-title themselves Corpus Crispy College. Hmm.