Storyteller’s World

I don’t know whether it was the cumulative effect of four church services, a drinks party before lunch, and carols at the bowls club (plus pint of beer) followed by a couple of glasses of wine when I got home; but I found it hard keeping up with Miss Marple last night. In fact, I even found myself dozing off in the course of her investigations. Now, it could be the large numbers of characters who look pretty much the same. I mean, I can tell James Fox and Joanna Lumley and Simon Callow apart, but some of the younger things haven’t lived long enough to have acquired that patina of ‘character’, and it looked to me as if they were the ones whodunnit. Plus there are all the social and class issues of the 1950s, which were definitely beyond my ken.

At various moments of wakefulness, it appeared that it wasn’t the butler who did it, but the lesbian lovers. Now, I haven’t read much Agatha Christie, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this was not even a sub-text of her original, but just introduced as some director’s bid to put a bit of life into the old formula. So I don’t know if I rejoice in this startling development, like the fast young things; or bridle at them, like the stuffy colonels. Either way, there’s one thing about good old Agatha: she does tend to type cast you into one of her character stereotypes. It’s every bit as much fun as actually taking part in a murder weekend.

After the exertions of yesterday, I didn’t quite manage to get through today without singing any carols. The plan had been to have a day of quiet withdrawal from the world, to get Christmas cards done. This is a tedious but also a spiritual exercise, as sending cards to the whole church membership becomes a way of remembering and thinking about people, which turns easily to prayer. But when I got fed up with it and tired, I thought to myself, Oh, I’ll just have one more try at getting the wireless ADSL router set up. Ha! Even though I did manage to get through to a couple of help lines (it was a day of miracles, too) it didn’t solve the problem. In fact it left me without a Broadband signal, full stop.

So I went out to sing carols at one of our sheltered housing complexes, deeply despondent and preoccupied. This is the mark of a true tech addict, to be so anxious about this in comparison with all the people in the world who have real problems, like the couple in this block of flats who live above a paranoid schizophrenic being ‘cared for in the community’, i.e. allowed to wreak havoc and mayhem on his elderly neighbours by playing loud music at 2 or 3 in the morning, get aggressive to the environmental officers when they get called out, and generally have his ‘rights’ given a higher priority than those of these neighbours. As a result this poor woman was prescribed strong anti-depressants by her GP - who should, of course, have been moving heaven and earth to get the situation properly dealt with and the nuisance neighbour treated or moved on. As, indeed, so should I. In the Brave New World of ASBOs, this man would presumably be dealt with. But because he is mentally ill, his rights not to be locked up and supervised to make sure he takes his medication, seem to be paramount. It’s a crazy world.

When I come home, the broadband signal is inexplicably OK, leaving me to wonder whether there really was a fault, whether I had broken something, but only partly, whether the signal will come and go as fancy takes it, and so on.

Why is a Christmas carol like a mince pie?

Answer: Because, if you’re a clergyperson, by the time Christmas actually comes, you’ve probably had so many of both that you don’t want to eat another one, sing another one, or look another one in the face.

Somehow, this year, that moment has come already, even though Christmas is still nearly a fortnight away. What has brought this about? It’s got a lot to do with our generosity and success in wanting to go and lead or contribute to lots of carol singing in all sorts of places: the local pub, the bowls club, the old folks’ homes etc. It’s a good thing for the church to be going out to where the people are: that’s a genuinely mission-shaped impulse. But at the same time, isn’t there the danger that it merely ‘baptises’ people’s preferred social activities or environments, so that they don’t have to disturb their routine by thinking about God in any costly way. When we sing carols at the bowls club, some people join us for the singing (in the bar, naturally), but there are far more who are still on the indoor green playing their Sunday evening matches. Part of me wants to shout, ‘Right! You want to sing carols? Come to church and sing carols!’ Not very mission-shaped. But maybe more prophetic. Can these two really be in opposition?

So while we drove there and back again, contemplating DIRFT, the volume of traffic, and the general craziness of our roads-fixated culture, the conversation naturally turned to great road haulage companies we have known. You know how it is when you’re trying to think of a name you know really well, and you just can’t bring it to mind. We could not think of the name of that man with all the lorries, you know, we used to see them all the time up north when we lived in Durham. We ran through all the Christian names we could think of, and Harry seemed to ring a bell. But then we got stuck on finding a surname to go with it, couldn’t get beyond Harry Ramsden, at which point my mind wandered off on an irreverent fantasy of shaven-headed proselytisers chanting ‘Harry Ramsden, Harry Ramsden, Ramsden Ramsden, Harry Harry.’

We did better thinking of one of his foreign competitors, that one called something like Norbert Dentist-strangler. But this also turned out to be one of those ideas which will be fixed in my mind for ever, and every time I go and see Steve my dentist from now on, I won’t be able to prevent myself thinking of this army of French juggernaut-drivers coming over here to wreak havoc on our dental hygiene.

Passing DIRFT on the way home of course, you are able to see the other side of the enormous warehouse that carries the man’s name in letters ten metres high: Eddie Stobart.

Off at first light - well, just after 8 - to drive to Nottingham to collect Tui from university. It’s just about a hundred miles, half motorway and half winding single carriageway roads from the M40 across to the M1, that takes about 2 hours. The world and their spouse seemed to be on the roads this morning, either going to collect offspring from university, or struggle with the Christmas shopping, or (in the case of two-car families) probably both.

Willoughby Hall was bedlam, even though ‘most people’ (according to Tui) went home yesterday. Family cars parked on the grass, parents and children struggling down via a single lift to crush clothes, belongings, TV sets, computers into the back of cars. Even without a TV and computer, Tui’s stuff has to be shoe-horned in and I wonder if there will be room to take the wife and daughter home as well as the luggage. Leave them there over Christmas? Hmmm - things will be quieter, certainly, but also a bit lonely. So we decide we’ll all get in somehow.

We’re introduced to Tui’s new boyfriend Dave, having been told to be gentle with him as he’s frightened of us. This is hard to believe, as he’s the first boyfriend Tui has had who is taller than she is, and hence towers over both me and Alison. He’s a second year medic, plays the cello, piano and guitar, and is ‘very polite’. But Tui saw him first, right?

When all is stowed within, and goodbyes said, we drive off to Derby to call in on Val and Gus, deliver Christmas presents, have coffee. Derby is full of police because of the local soccer Derby: Derby County vs. Nottingham Forest. (Final score 3-0.) On the way out of Derby (the world and their spouse are still trying to get in) we stopped at an eatery for lunch. We won’t be stopping there again, I think. Reasonably enough priced, but a bit sans taste, as even the non-smoking area was full of smoke. It looked like the heaters worked by sucking air out of the smoking section, heating it up and pumping it back into non-smoking. Good idea, that.

Arrived home safely, tired and thankful.

All over the country people are driving up and down collecting children from universities Somewhere Else. It powerfully made me think of DIRFT which we pass near the M1 junction. This is the kind of place to which food and products are gathered from all over the country and then transported all over the country again. The result, as a programme on TV told us last night, was that even though you may (on rare occasions, it’s true) find food in a supermarket that was produced less than 30 miles from the store, it will almost certainly have travelled hundreds of miles from farm or producer to some faraway depot like DIRFT, before being driven back again.

There has to be some better way of doing things.

Petrol prices are all over the place at the moment. At our nearest filling station this afternoon, a litre of unleaded was 85.9 pence. (Oxford petrol prices have always been about the highest anywhere in the UK, on the alleged grounds that companies have further to bring it from the refineries or wherever it comes from, but on the actual grounds that they can command any price they like, so this excuse is as good as any.) But 4 miles away at Sainsbury’s, that ‘price war’ had started and the marked price was 78.9 pence a litre, but with the 5p off for spending more than £50 on groceries this week, we actually paid 73.9 pence a litre. A difference of 12 pence. This seems like madness.

(For US readers, 85.9p a litre is £3.59 a gallon, or $7.51. Only it’s more complicated than that because a US gallon is less than a British one. Let’s do the sum again. 85.9p a litre = £3.25 a US gallon, or $6.26.) Though any mathematician reading this is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong.

The Puritans tried to abolish Christmas during the Commonwealth. It looks like the new Puritans of the early 21st century are trying to do same. Mind you, I think I’m just jealous ’cause I don’t have an office party. Sitting in the study with a paper hat on and a glass of champagne in my hand while I’m writing a sermon about John the Baptist just doesn’t have quite the same feel as dancing on the desk or photocopying myself. (Naturally I can’t imagine what this means.)

The other day I posted a comment at Claire’s post in which she mused about her quandary about believing the Christmas stories. She came back with the question: So do some Christians see the nativity story as a kind of metaphor?

It’s another one of those questions which is so hard to answer, that I’m left thinking it can’t be the right question. ‘A kind of metaphor’ makes it sound not quite true. Yet there are all kinds of places - just take poems as one example - where a metaphor is truer and more economical than a thousand words could be. And the other side of it is, that even with a congregation that I’ve known and worshipped with for 14 years, it’s quite impossible to say what each individual means or believes by anything that they sing or say in hymn or liturgy. We can’t even know if I see ‘red’ the same as you do. How can we possibly know if what Joe understands when he says “conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary” is the same as what Helen, or I, mean when we say the same words. That’s why I am wanting to say: A consent to the Story is more important, and has more value, than an attempt to define what one means by it. We don’t want heresy hunts. We want people whose lives are changed, inspired, by hearing and living a story.

Among my friends and especially parishioners, I am reckoned as pretty computer-literate. But every so often my hi-tech ambitions seem to outrun my knowledge or capabilities. I think I’m having one of those moments (months?) now. It’s been one of those adventures where every little step on its own seems like a good idea at the time, but you then find you can’t stop there. You just have to take the next step, which is a little bit more costly and takes you a little bit more out of your comfort zone. I suppose it’s a bit like walking on that proverbial tight-rope over the Niagara Falls. One step doesn’t seem too far - you can always just leap backwards if you have to. But then, to keep your balance, you find yourself having to take one more step forward, and another, and suddenly you’re halfway across the void and any form of safety looks like a lifetime away.

Right now I’m actually trying to walk on two tightropes at the same time; if that isn’t stretching a metaphor too far. Well, it is. One is signing up for broadband; which is a great boon, but enabling it for all the other computers in the house seems to be that Niagara too far. The other is changing the blog. I know I’m going to get there with this: it’s only a learning curve for me, and a question of tweaking settings and stylesheets. I think. But the broadband thing is about hardware and configurations and probably having to talk to experts on the help-line - now there’s a concept for you - if you’re lucky enough ever to get through to one of them. And then they turn out not to know any more than you do. It makes you feel that a clockwork computer might be a good idea.

Storyteller’s World is moving to another location: please come with me, and if you link to this blog, I’d be really pleased if you would update your links, RSS feeds and other geekeries. See you in the new place!

Lots of people seem to get fed up with Blogger after a time, and want to move to somewhere else in the blogworld. Tom Allen solved the dilemma by taking out a Typepad subscription. I also wanted more control and speed, but if it was going to cost me money, I would prefer to upgrade my hosting package and use a blogging program which works on my own host server. Hence WordPress. It’s a long way from being the way I want it yet. I haven’t got the look of it right. I haven’t worked out how to import all my Blogger archives, which you’re supposed to be able to do. But at least we seem to be up and running.

These scary news reports about another thing having been discovered to cause infertility crop up with such regularity, that you could almost think they must be pandering to some paranoia among men. (Can you credit such an idea?!)

So I thought it was time for a bit of Web research. On a reputable looking and British site I found that the following are thought to be causes of infertility in men:

• Very hot baths
• Obesity (folds of fat hanging round the testicles and overheating them)
• Tight underpants
• Too much sitting down
• Too much sex (three times a day: bad; every three days: good)
• Too many cigarettes (20+ per day)
• Too much alcohol (’for a variety of reasons’ ?!)
• Too much work

So, nothing there about some of the other things that are sometimes cited as causes of infertility:

• Standing too near a microwave oven
• Keeping your mobile phone in your trouser pocket
• All that oestrogen in the drinking water because of the numbers of women taking the Pill.
• Mumps (extremely rare, as a cause of infertility)

Source: malefertility.co.uk - though they do seem to be trying to sell you something, namely a wonder treatment to aid the production of healthy sperm.

BBC NEWS | Health | Laptops may damage male fertility
I never sit with mine on my lap, as it happens. But in any case, fortunately, I’ve done my bit of investing in the future of the human race already.

Back in July, when I had just started using Blogger, one of the first things that captivated me about the possibilities of this tool for blogging was getting a response to something I’d posted about visiting Dorchester-on-Thames where an episode of the new Miss Marple series was being filmed. Rebecca from Boardman, Ohio, e-mailed me about it, having found my post via some search engine or other.

Now at last, the series is about to be broadcast on ITV, starting at 9 p.m. next Sunday. With Geraldine McEwan playing Miss Marple, the rest of the cast list looks like the complete directory of British actors: Ian Richardson, Tara Fitzgerald, Simon Callow, Joanna Lumley, James Fox, etc. - to say nothing of later episodes.

Coming soon is Murder at the Vicarage:

At the vicarage in St Mary Mead, the vicar, his wife, the curate and an artist discuss how they might kill Colonel Protheroe. The next day he’s dead.

Now that’s what I call a ministry team! Good job they didn’t involve the PCC, or they’d still be discussing it.

I’ve started reading The Seven Basic Plots and it’s actually very compelling: you keep wanting to read on and it’s no effort at all. Christopher Booker has read widely and seems to know a lot about what he’s read. Which makes it all the more uncomfortable to find myself moaning about some of the examples I do know something about, viz. the biblical stories. (Not least because I start to ask myself: If he’s wrong about these, what else might he be wrong about?)

Thus, there were ten plagues of Egypt, not seven, as he informs us. (In a book about stories, in which numbers play an important part, this is pretty major. We’re not talking seven dwarves here, you know.)

Then there are the spelling mistakes: Niniveh instead of Nineveh, Phaoroah instead of Pharaoh. Which I can’t help noticing because both occur two or three times. I can just see this happening. Author types in a strange word. Spell-checker queries it, but has no correct version in its data-base. Author fails to check whether s/he has spelled it right, and instructs spell-checker to ‘learn’ a wrong spelling. I guess we’ve all done it. But when you’re reading a £25 tome, you do expect that one of the things you’ve paid for is decent spelling and proof-reading.

I know, I know. I’m living in the past, again.

A week ago the BBC web-site was reporting that the most looked-up word of 2004, according to Merriam-Webster Online, was ‘blog’ - and I thought nothing of it. But just today I went to the web-site and discovered what the second most looked-up word was. Any guesses?

It was incumbent. So, from one of those who is one, (according to its Latin derivation, someone who is lying down on the job - I wish) all I can say is, a happy 2004 to all you word-seekers. Carry on blogging - and lying down on the job.

Because all you have to do is change one word in your site’s stylesheet:
text-transform:uppercase; to text-transform:lowercase;
to make all the titles of your posts look different: like they are today. And then if you get fed up with this look, you can change them back again. It’s a lazy man’s dream.

I’m just giving enormous and hearty thanks to whatever angel keeps an eye on dogs. Personally, I was surprised there was one - I’m one of those people who can’t recognise one dog from another of the same breed - but dog-loving friends assure me there is such an angel, genius or deity. Anyway, he/she/it was looking after Polly just now.

I was cycling through the village when a dog (which naturally I did not recognise) dashed out at me with every appearance of wanting to knock me off my bike and lick me to death. I was shouting at it to go away - in the course of which it nearly ran under two passing cars - when I saw a friend running down the road, and realised at last whose dog it was. Friend was in great distress, and it was only after a couple more cars and the intervention of another passer-by that we arrested an excited Polly - who was clearly having a great time - and got her lead on.

Thank you, Dog, that I wasn’t partly responsible for killing a friend’s companion. That would have been pretty terrible.

Thanks to Scribblingwoman for the link to the Hero Machine. As a result it’s now possible to view my hidden, superhero alter ego. Voila! Supervicar.

Well, I thought so when I saw Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories. It’s a stonking great tome weighing in at 1.2 kilos, 728 pages and £25. So not the kind of book that makes for easy bedtime reading. You can’t slip it into your pocket and read it in an idle moment at the bus stop, either. Also, it got reviews in the Observer and Daily Telegraph that were admiring at the same time as dismissive - a bit of professional envy here, perhaps? But, thanks to my good friend Dr S. I had a recent book token to invest in it, in the name of professional development, continuing ministerial education etc.

In another review, someone claimed to have read it thoroughly in 7 days. But I think you may have to watch this space for 7 months to find out a) if I manage to get through it; and b) what I think of it.

When I came to this parish, we had an Over 60s Club. The membership were mostly in their 80s, like the lady who had faithfully run it for 40 or more years. It was all somewhat in decline. Winnie used to complain that no one else was willing to help her run the club, at the same time as making it difficult for anyone else to do so. Human nature and systems are the same all over, aren’t they?

At last Winnie simply had to give up, and after the usual agonising about how the club could possibly continue, several good people came forward to take it over, in a real sharing of roles between those who could stand up and chair meetings, and those who dreaded doing that, but were really very good at organising and making things happen. They also took the opportunity to change the name to the Over 50s Club. This had the effect of making the present vicar eligible to be a member (!) and reducing the average age. Not to 50-something; but certainly to 60- and especially 70-something. Since then the whole thing has taken on a new lease of life and is thriving, with a membership of more than 60.

Today was the club’s annual Christmas Lunch outing, to which I get invited. It’s an occasion I wouldn’t miss for the world, even though I’m by several years the youngest there. We go to the Mitre in the High, and I get a chance to do several weeks’ worth of ‘visiting’ all under the same roof. And a good time is had by all.

In the mean time I reflect that it’s all very well having clubs which are supposed to be for retired people (presumably?) You may then call them Over 50s, to reflect the fact that many people take early retirement, or are made redundant at this sort of age, and don’t work again. But what’s going to happen in this projected Brave New World future, when the pensions crisis means we have to go on working well up to and beyond the former retiring age? (I thoroughly agree with this in theory, of course. Why should people work for only 45 or 50 years - in many cases more like 40, if they go through tertiary education - and then have possibly as much as 30 years of doing nothing? It does seem a waste of human potential.) The result may be that only one short generation of Over 50s Clubs may exist. In a very few years’ time, clubs for retired people will revert to being Over 60s, then Over 70s - and after that, who knows?

Here was a moment I overheard on the radio a couple of weeks back, and wished I had recorded or recalled more accurately. The news reader solemnly began, “And - has the Holy Grail been found?” With barely a pause, he segued into a completely different mode: “You will probably guess the answer is No, from the fact that this is our second, rather than our first, story.” Not sure if this was scripted, but it was certainly a gem.

One of the joys of telling stories to the same audience is that it becomes a collaborative project. After all, you can’t have a storytelling with just a storyteller: you need story-listeners too. So I can begin, almost as a formula, with “Are you ready to help spin a yarn, and weave a tale?” and know that they are.

Today at our Family (Toy) Service I told a version of The Gift of the Magi by O.Henry, filtered via Margaret Silf’s Wisdom Stories. When I first read it there I thought it was a bit thin, or sickly sentimental. But in this collaborative telling, with suitable pauses and audience response, it came alive. The adults could see the ending coming (but loved it anyway when it came) and the children - well, I find them harder to read, but they certainly listened and were with it all the way.

I still only begin to glimpse this magic, and feel just as far as ever from understanding it. Perhaps I never shall understand it. Perhaps it is good not to.

According to today’s Observer, weblogs are the voice of the underclass - people who are abused not just by corporate culture but also by celebrity culture. This leaves me as a blogger feeling peculiarly socially displaced. It’s bad enough being consigned to the middle class just because I have a university degree and live in a vicarage. Now there’s the additional reason to be underwhelmed, that I blog because I feel frustratingly relegated to an underclass.

It turns out, however, that the bloggers the Observer has in mind (whose blogs I have absolutely no intention of linking to from here) merely add to the general and sickening fascination with celebrity - they just do it in a ruder way than the celebrities like. Well, my heart bleeds. If blogging really has a social purpose and value, it’s because of the times and places where it really does give a voice to the voiceless. Which doesn’t include the lackeys of the New York media elite.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been plotting how to discontinue having our traditional Christmas Bazaar, which sometimes feels as if it’s got into the ‘As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be’ mode. The trouble is, this has never been a popular idea. People actually like the Bazaar; and it raises money that we give away to good causes. But it has sometimes felt like a burden falling on the same faithful souls year after year. And how do you discern, anyway, when it’s time to stop doing what has been done in the past, and turn your efforts to something new?

Well, this year’s Bazaar took place this morning, to raise money for Divya Shanthi (the Christian association in Bangalore that we support) and the Oxfordshire Association for the Blind. And it was a really happy, friendly event. Everyone had fun. There was none of the grumbling sense of being put upon that has sometimes been hanging around. So now I haven’t got the heart to suggest scrapping it next year. And I still don’t know how to discern about endings and new beginnings: surely one of the hardest things in church life.

John Naughton posts about how to deal politely with people who will persist in sending attachments in Microsoft Word format. (Like my dear colleagues and friends at Diocesan Church House, and in fact just about everyone who ever sends me attachments.) He suggests sending them a reply phrased something like this (slightly edited for the purposes of ecto.) I’d love to do this but haven’t yet had the brass cheek.

Thanks for writing. However the attachment to your message is in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format that I avoid whenever possible. If you send me plain text, rtf, HTML, or PDF, then I will read it. Distributing documents in Word (or Excel) format could be bad for your correspondents because they can carry viruses. Sending Word attachments could be bad for you, because a Word document normally includes hidden information about the author, enabling those in the know to pry into his or her activities. For example, text that you think you deleted may still be embarrassingly present. But above all, sending people Word documents puts pressure on them to use Microsoft software and helps to deny them any other choice. In effect, you become a buttress of the Microsoft monopoly and reduce the incentive for people to explore alternatives. Can I respectfully ask that you reconsider the use of Word format for communication with other people?

I’m grateful to Victoria Coren in last Sunday’s Observer for the insight into the dreadful impact that a misplaced consonant can have on one’s life and reputation. If only Philip Larkin had read the proofs more carefully, and noticed the single miss-set letter in the first line of his sensitive poem about an idyllic childhood: ‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad’.

But would it, after all, have made any difference? I’ve been thinking about how we think about our childhood, and how it differs from the way our parents remember and feel about the same events. And all because of Tom’s comment about the chocolate Advent calendar he wanted and was never allowed, and his miserable old dad’s grumbling about the Advent Calendar pictures ‘not having much to do with the real message of Christmas’.

I didn’t have the (mis)fortune to grow up in a vicarage myself, and neither did Alison, so we’ve had to make it up ourselves as we went along. We may have done it ‘properly’, or at least, the way generations of clergy have done it before us, in the sense that we’ve left our children with psychic baggage about being vicarage kids that they are going to have to deal with for the rest of their lives. It’s not only clergy parents who leave their children with lifelong baggage, mind you. I’ve already blogged about some of what I feel about my dad and his expectations of me that I found burdensome, or contrary to what I envisioned myself to be. The truly terrible thing is that this doesn’t just happen in abusive and damaging families. Even our most loving and best-intentioned ones leave scars. Even the parents who did the best they could, in circumstances where they were stressed, distracted, selfish, depressed, exhausted, anxious, poor, just plain human, leave their children with unintended wounds.

I particularly cringe at the image I now have of myself in that puritan hat I have so dreaded and suffered from in my own inner life. Spoiling my son’s innocent, childish Advent joy and delight in - of all things - chocolate! and conveying the image that Christmas is somehow dour and joyless. Out of the best intentions, to try and honour the story of God’s own gift of self; yet taking away from the enjoyment of so much else that he has given.

Oh yes, a part of me wants to say, Let’s hear the parent’s side of the story too. (A bit like wanting to read Philip Gosse’s version of his son Edmund’s book, Father and Son.)

But that would be an excuse. The fact is, Philip Larkin has got it right. Your mum and dad really do tuck you up. With a capital F.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Blunkett wins right to seek access
How come the Home Secretary gets the courts to uphold his claim to see his son, when Fathers4Justice dads don’t? I do hope he’s keeping his maintenance payments up…

I was searching the Web today for one of those handy maps or lists of all the wars currently going on in the world: there was something of the sort in the Radio Times a few weeks ago. Naturally - I should have expected as much - this was not as straightforward as I had hoped. It seems that one person’s war is another’s insurrection is another’s campaign of terrorism is another’s organised criminal activity.

The list on Wikipedia could easily be an area for endless arguments about NPOV. While the WILPF web-site includes an entry among Minor Armed Conflicts for USA vs. poor people: ‘mostly African American shooting each other and others, inner cities’. True, but not quite what I was looking for.

Where to find something authoritative, impartial, but also holding similar (unbiased, impartial) views to myself? I thought I was getting somewhere with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, but even here there doesn’t seem to be one handy page I can look at which has a world map with all the wars marked, linking to more information. Does anyone else know if there’s that kind of Dummies Guide to Wars anywhere?

Not sure whether I’m more intrigued by my son’s idea, or bewildered about having children who think they need to protect their clerical father from the real world? Whatever images can we expect here?

I can’t really decide what to make of the David Blunkett storm-in-a-teacup (if that’s what it is.) On the one hand, there’s the usual hypocrisy of the British media about any sexual misdoings in high places. A compound of envy that here’s this boring old politician somehow attracting a rather good-looking younger woman, with the prurience which actually admires this when it involves glamorous, star-quality celebrities. This hypocrisy just makes me sick.

But on the other hand, we are talking about an adulterer. Someone who induced another person to break her vows to her husband; and just as with Robin Cook and many another, I’m not sure that I trust someone who is faithless, or encourages faithlessness, in such ‘little’, private matters, to be faithful or honest in ‘big’ public ones. I know this is pretty unfashionable, but I really don’t believe we can compartmentalise morality like that. And, according to the headline of one rag, he only wants access to his child! No, I don’t believe mere biology gives him any claim or right, if he hasn’t the faith or decency to commit legally and publicly to the mother, and she to him.

I forgot to mention the little treat I allowed myself on the way back from Church House to Marylebone: popped in to the Apple Store in Regent Street. It’s an astonishing place, designed more like a play area for grown-up kids, than a shop. (Sort of Early Learning Centre for geeks.) The really annoying thing was that because it was so crowded, all the play areas were occupied and I ended up having to buy something (the something I’d really gone there for) and leave, without having a chance to play myself. But since most of the play that was going on seemed to consist of downloading tunes onto their iPods - and an iPod is a gadget I’m not currently tempted by - I’m not sure what I would have found to ‘play’ with.

Basically I could do with another nearby Mac-head to compare notes with. That’s why it was such a treat when Tom was home the other Sunday and we spent the whole meal talking Mac OS. Much to Li’s disgust.

(And another thing. Today was my first journey on the Jubilee Line, and the interchange at Baker Street looked just like something out of a slightly nightmarish futuristic film.)

Something about Going To London always makes me feel like a deep country cousin, a straw-chewing yokel. Doesn’t matter that I was born at University College Hospital - I don’t know if you call that Bloomsbury, or just plain Euston - and was a London suburbanite and sometimes commuter for the first quarter century of my life. I’ve been away too long, it’s all too changed.

Today I went to this training day run by the Ministry Division at Church House, the very nerve centre and beating heart that is the HQ of the Church of England !?! So whereas this country mouse usually travels to London on the coach, taking a good two hours, I felt important enough to put on a jacket and go by train from Haddenham Parkway to Marylebone and claimed travelling expenses. Is it more comfortable? Well, it’s quicker.

And what are we to make of training? Sometimes I think the whole point of the sessions is to read through the literature with and for people who haven’t bothered to read it themselves beforehand. Which I had done, as well as doing the preliminary exercise we were asked to do (oh, virtuous self!) and it took practically all of Monday, too. But then again, even though I had read it, it was good and reinforcing to go through it and discuss with others. So maybe even training has some purpose.

And now I know, for example, all about the Changes in Nomenclature. So that the national process for selecting candidates for ordination training is no longer called a Selection Conference, but the Bishops’ Advisory Panel on Selection for Training for Ordained and Accredited Lay Ministry. And myself, who used to be just a Pastoral Selector, am now a Bishops’ Selection Adviser (Pastoral). So please don’t forget that, now. When you hear that this BSA(P) is going to attend a BAPSTOALM, you will know exactly what is meant and nod sagely over your Church Times and corn flakes. Thank you, friends.