Storyteller’s World

I find myself doing some research into ‘Anglican prayer beads’ in preparation for a Lenten talk I’ve been asked to give, on the strength of that old Grove booklet about the rosary.

It intrigues me that the word ‘tell’ is used both for what you do with stories (relating them, or recounting), and what you do with beads (tallying, or counting them). The connection between the two seems for the present intuitive rather than rational. That’s to say, I don’t actually understand it, just feel it.

It also intrigues me that both the Islamic prayer beads and Buddhist ones that I have, have one bead too many. There should be 99 and 108 respectively (I think!). Someone hasn’t been tallying them correctly. Or maybe what I got was the ’seconds’ that are sold to tourists?

On the so called ‘Anglican Rosary’ the best sites I’ve found are:
St Gabriel’s Episcopal Church, and
King of Peace.

Vivian Green, distinguished historian, fellow, chaplain, sub-rector and later rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, died on January 18, 2005.

He made an impression on generations of students. He was a great influence on John Le Carré, and it later became known that he was the model for Le Carré’s spymaster George Smiley in his novels.

When I met Vivian in 1967, he was a couple of years younger than I am now (aargh!) and at that time chaplain of Lincoln. The only time we spoke was when he invited me, in a group of other freshers, for sherry and a little chat. The idea was to introduce himself to the new students, and let us know that he was there, available to us, willing to counsel, advise, etc. To me it felt like another one of those frightening summonses by brilliant middle-aged dons, that would show up my ignorance and general lack of social graces. Most of my Oxford undergraduate life was like that.

So the only thing that has stuck in my memory for 38 years is a line from the JCR student review for that year, in which one song alluded to Vivian’s custom of wearing leather trousers and riding a motorbike: “Did you ever hear of a chaplain, who thought he was Emma Peel?”

So many missed opportunities, to benefit from the learning and gifts of the people I’ve encountered over the years…

Obituaries in the Times, and (rather less accurate) the Telegraph.

Kathryn obviously shares my love of Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea stories. Ah, but Kathryn, do you also know Always Coming Home, and, even better, The Telling? (The latter should also be, I reckon, required reading for the homosexuality debate.)

Last year I bought myself a new copy of the Earthsea Quartet, and re-read them all. What a treat!

When Tui’s friend was staying with us at Christmas, she asked if she could read it. “Yeeees,” I said, nervously. And not without reason. For I’ve just noticed that the book now looks not only as if it has been read but also as if it has been in a young woman’s handbag together with everything else in the world that lives there.

When I mentioned this to Alison, she said something along the lines of, Come off it, it’s only a book.

To which the only response is something like what Paul says in (possibly) my favourite film:

“And don’t say, It’s only a game! That is the worst thing you could possibly say! It is quite clearly not only a game!”

The Observer reports that there’s to be a parliamentary inquiry into Prince Charles’ ’salary’. Apparently the Prince’s income last year from all the land in the Duchy of Cornwall that he ‘owns’ (how? why?) was £12,000,000. Twelve million pounds. Over the past ten years, that figure has increased by 300%.

I’ve been doing a few simple sums. You could employ 240 people to do useful jobs, at £50,000 a year, for twelve million pounds. If you only wanted to pay them £20,000 (still more than a clergy stipend) you could employ 600. Or, playing with the figures a different way, if I wanted to earn twelve million, I would have to put off retirement until some time after 2605.

Makes you think?

Looks like more troubled times are befalling Blogger. A number of blogspot addresses (including at least one I subscribe to via Bloglines) have been taken over by some sort of outfit which posts anonymous, supposedly genuine posts which turn out to contain links to various pornographic sites.

What’s going on here? Is this something that’s been happening for a long time? Or has it only just started? And has anyone else noticed it?

I realise these past days that part of the pain I am nursing somewhere deep down, is a hatred of what I am.

I am a Christian.

Yet so many things about being a Christian are things I can no longer bear to be a part of. The most Christian nation in the world is also the most powerful, most militaristic, imperialist, materialistic, resources-squandering, dangerous power in the world. The most committed Christians - like Anglican Mainstream in this country - have a frightening intensity and certainty that seem more likely to harm than to heal. So many terrible things have been done, are still being done, in the name of religion, especially in the name of Christianity, that I am ashamed to be associated with.

I am a Labour supporter.

Yet after 8 years of Labour Government, we have been taken into a war that most of the country opposed, and are still embroiled in an occupation of that conquered people, shoring up the foreign policies of a questionable ally. And we still have a taxation system that favours the rich and powerful and therefore places a disproportionate share of the burden on the less wealthy.

I am a man.

Yet it is men who are responsible for so much of the evil in the world: the wars, the rape and oppression of women, the physical and sexual abuse of children, the destruction of the natural environment. The human trafficking that maggi dawn and others have been writing about, such an appalling and monstrous evil, is perpetrated by men.

And yet how can I turn away from my faith in God, my political convictions, my gender? That would be like cutting off a limb, gouging out an organ. Is this what Jesus meant by, ‘If your eye offends you, pluck it out; it is better to enter heaven without an eye, than to be cast into the fires of hell’? Are people who care, condemned to be torn apart between the reality of the world, and the truth, the very identity, of their inmost being?

SIR -
Today I saw my first wedding of the year. Is this a record?

Well, obviously not. In the past people got married throughout the year, at all seasons. Sometimes because they ‘had to’, often also because they had decided to live together and didn’t want to wait any longer. Nowadays, when these factors carry much less weight - people don’t feel they have to get married to live together or even have babies - it’s very noticeable that most weddings cluster in the summer from May to September, and to have one to conduct in January seems quite unusual. At least I haven’t got as much ‘out of practice’ as I do some years when I don’t have any to take from September to May. But what is noticeable this year is that we have fewer wedding bookings than any time since I came to this parish.

I’ve been reflecting on last night’s Storytelling Circle, and the several different styles of telling in the group. One member tells stories professionally: his stories are very polished, often with musical accompaniment. They come over as word perfect, performances: the two he told last night seemed identical in every way to the last time I heard him tell them. Which was the other thing: I wondered about his repertoire, and how many stories he actually tells.

A second is also very fluent, but obviously not recalling learnt words. What he has learned is the shape and images of the story, which he then tells in the words that are right at the moment. They are, for the most part, not stories that would appeal to me, or that I would think of telling, and I can’t identify what it is about a story that ‘draws’ you to it, to want to make it your own.

A third is also obviously very experienced, and tells in a lively, engaging style. She adds asides linking to other stories that have been told, or responses from the group. It’s flexible, interactive. The stories are witty and there’s a good use of accent. But again, they aren’t stories I would easily want to add to my stock of tales to tell. (I have heard her tell one that I would think of telling myself, but that’s about all.)

Another man enjoys telling, has an attractive voice and manner, but gives you the impression he is working to remember or reconstruct the story even while he tells it. He hasn’t done the work beforehand, of remembering and understanding it. (You have to know how a story ‘works’, have a sense of its inner being, to tell it with real conviction.)

And my own telling last night wasn’t much more polished than his, because I too was ‘rehearsing’, telling and hearing for the first time a story that was only in process of being born. A story is a living thing, maybe it is a bit like giving birth to a baby: it and I were only just getting acquainted, but it was different again from all the other styles people were using.

And then there were the people who ‘just’ listened. Without story-listeners, you can’t have story-telling. And it’s a special art all of its own: for myself, I find it difficult to listen to stories. I’m too much wanting to know how the story works, and to observe the technique or what’s happening to the hearers. Or else (God forgive me) I’m thinking, I could do better than this. I listen best when I quickly identify the story (who knows how?) as one I want to remember and tell myself.

This is a whole new craft I am still only beginning, and understand so little of how it works. I feel like Ged before he goes to school on Roke. I have some small power to work the magic, some small experience; but I know so little of how to control it, or what it can do.

Was the story I told this evening. It’s a ‘Tale of the Parish’, set in the time of the Parliamentary War against the King. It began to come into being yesterday, but as always (this is the way I make up stories) I couldn’t really practise and rehearse it, or see how it worked - or didn’t - before there was an audience there to hear it. That’s one of the things I like about the storytelling circle: it’s a kind of laboratory or workshop for working out and working up stories. I’m pleased with the general idea of ‘Trooper Jackson’s Bargain’; but it’s not quite polished or fully-formed yet.

There were 14 people at the Circle meeting, quite a few of them experienced tellers, so I didn’t have time to tell the other story I was thinking of, a shorter one called ‘The Farmer and the Samurai’. (Not a story of my own, but from Jack Maguire’s Power of Personal Storytelling.) Next time, perhaps?

That Michael Howard may be a very nice man, a really devoted friend and colleague, kind to animals and children, etc. etc. The trouble is, he can’t open his mouth without sounding patronising. He always sounds as if he’s talking to a complete load of idiots - which may not be far from what he is thinking. And if there’s one thing the elector can’t stand, it’s being talked to, as if you were an idiot, by someone who thinks you are one.

They really should have kept that nice young William Hague. I think he would have grown on people after a bit. (Had the right hair style, too.)

What I can’t bear the thought of, is Labour winning again because the Tories lost. That was fun last time around, but this time we deserve something better. They could start by getting rid of the Prime Liability in good time before the election. That might bring those of us who are wavering on the point of defection back into the fold.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Warning over Windows Word files

Another reason (did we need another one?) why Microsoft Word files should not be used as an ‘industry standard”. They are unsafe, and discriminate against people who don’t use Microsoft products on ideological, economic or moral grounds.

Don’t believe me: hear it from Tim Berners-Lee, just voted Greatest Briton of 2004. He asks people not to send him files in MS format, but in plain text or HTML.

Church House, are you listening?

If you’re in Oxford this Friday night, come to the meeting of the Oxford Storytelling Circle. 7.30 p.m. at the Friends’ Meeting House in St Giles. I hope to be there to tell two tales. Come and help!

BBC NEWS | England | Somerset | Sex movie mix-up shocks couple
What about the story of the couple who bought a Doris Day movie DVD and found they were watching something else?

The couple, regular attendees at their local Baptist church, settled down with a cup of tea to watch the 1957 musical which has a U (universal) certificate.

“It was a pretty raunchy, explicit film, it certainly pulled no punches,” Mr Leigh-Browne said.

“My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.

“The film became progressively more graphic, there was no plot to it, it was just sex.”

Alan and his wife Anne, 60, a retired teacher, complained to Safeway the next day and all copies of The Pajama Game were removed from the store.

(My italics) So: they pulled the ladder up after them, eh?

I’ve been thinking it’s about this time of year that I felt alive enough, last year, to start blogging. And lo and behold, it turns out it was exactly a year ago today. So ‘The Online Diary of a Storyteller‘, as it was called back then, is one year old today. At first it was more of a simple online journal, than a blog as most people know it. I used to write it with a text editor, paste the entries into an HTML file, and upload the updated file via FTP. Then on July 1st I changed over to Blogger. Say what you like about Blogger: it’s slow, buggy, etc. But I started getting a lot more readers. And this worked OK till December when the geek in me came out on top and I took control of my life by changing to WordPress. At the current address.

There’s a noble and venerable tradition of clergy kids rebelling against their parents’ lifestyle, faith and all. Sometimes they come back to the fold after they’ve had their fling, sometimes they don’t. Among those who do, quite a few of them end up getting ordained and having ministries all the more effective, or at least likely to attract some news attention, because they have once ‘walked on the wild side’. See, for example, the story of Jamie “Jay” Bakker.

Am I the only vicar who thinks he’s secretly failed because his children aren’t alcoholics, drug addicts, tattooed, criminals etc. - just normal young people who actually don’t, at the moment, want much to do with the Church of England?

Or else, they are all of the above, and have somehow managed to conceal it from their dad…

What do the following have in common?
a) Benjamin Zephaniah, internationally acclaimed poet, playwright, author, musician and campaigner
b) Tony Price, storyteller, blogger, vicar
(more…)

This wonderful image:

courtesy of the Error Message Generator

One of my favourite evenings out: Wine tasting at Kellogg College. The theme this evening was French wines, ably assisted as usual by Gavin Park, the manager of the local branch of Oddbins. I’m not that familiar with French wines, which the organiser this evening said were becoming more affordable (i.e. still beyond our usual budget). Still, we always learn something at these evenings, even though I usually forget it on account of the alcoholic content of the wines we sample. Perhaps if I wrote it down? Well, I do; but that’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to decipher my scrawl when I get home.

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, voted the most influential work of art of the 20th century - nay, of all time - has been preying on my mind in spite of the fact that I thought I wasn’t going to comment on it. It’s not so much the verdict itself, which is the kind of thing you have come to expect from art critics, and just makes you smile wrily. What I find I’m feeling, is angry that the man got credit for it at all.

I mean, it’s clever to put something in an unexpected place - a men’s urinal on the wall of an art gallery. It cocks a snook (or is that, snooks a cock?) at Art, the Art Establishment (who have now got their own back by voting it the most influential work of art, etc.) the bourgeois conception of art which Duchamp despised. But it’s only moderately clever, in a naughty child sense. It reminds me of Bart Simpson tricking Moe the bartender into calling out in his bar: “Is there a Seymour? Seymour Butts? Come on, guys, I wanna Seymour Butts.”

If you want real clever, even genius, you need to go to Norman Heatley, late of this parish, who modified the design of a hospital bedpan in order to enable the industrial production of penicillin. That’s what I call art.

No, I think of the forgotten and anonymous designer who actually designed this urinal - which is beautiful, in a functional, William Morris kind of way. I think of the men who worked in the factory and made it with their honest human labour, which is a beautiful thing. I think of the men who used these urinals for what they’re made for, which is a beautiful thing. How many of them, I wonder, died in the Great War, or in the Spanish Flu pandemic, or lost everything they had in the 1929 Wall Street crash? And then I think: and Marcel Duchamp got the credit for this as the most influential work of art? This is, actually, a measure of something being sick, somewhere, in our aesthetic.

Finally got round to watching the end of Who Wrote The Bible that I blogged about before. I liked Beckford’s conclusion: “To have faith in the world today is to ask questions, and never have the wool pulled over your eyes.”

Not that Richard Land, Southern Baptist, and adviser of Dubya, would agree. He was one scary peddlar of ‘God’s Word’: “God said it; that settles it; I believe it!” We saw him preaching to his flock about how the Bible says it is OK for Christians to go to war when the war is sanctioned by legitimate authority: but the UN is not legitimate authority, unless it agrees with the US Government. So, was there anything he would tell the Pres he should have done differently about Iraq. “Yes! I would have swamped Iraq with US troops: not just 120,000, but half a million!”

So, God says (in the Bible, no less) that it’s OK for Christians to kill people, especially people of other faiths, I suppose. No doubt Richard Land will also be telling the Pres that the capitalist system should be dismantled, because it’s based on usury, which God says is wrong. What, you don’t think he’ll be saying that? Surely not! You mean he could be a tad selective about what he hears God saying in the Bible? What about “God said it; that settles it; I believe it!”?

So why does he think God doesn’t say usury is wrong? Who decides that? Who says so? These really are slippery customers. They will never let you push them to utter the eventual truth, which is: “I say so - because I’ve already made up my mind that God says whatever will confirm my already-held views.”

Isn’t this what we all do? But some of us are more honest about it. Which means, there may be a slight chance that our views might change, when we see that the Bible says something different from what we’ve made up our minds about.

After morning service in one of my beloved parishes, followed by coffee, I drove home and thought I’d look in to the church hall in the other parish, where people would still be drinking coffee, to see if there was anyone who needed to see me about anything.

Jean came up to me with a cup of coffee, and without thinking quickly enough, I replied as I would have done if she had asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee: No thanks, Jean, I had a cup at Elsfield. The proper pastoral response would have been to accept it and drink it happily, or (if that was really impossible) pour it on the aspidistra. (Or equivalent.)

I realise this is the difference between the person who is merely nice and/or not a very quick thinker, and the person who is a true pastor, verging on saintliness - or just can think quicker than I can after a very tiring 48 hours.

A Muslim mother describes the poverty of children’s story books about the Prophet, and resolves to teach her children by telling them stories.

In fact, Christian books for children can be pretty dire too. Perhaps all parents would do better internalising their faith stories and telling them in their own words, rather than reading them to their children.

Welcome to the blogiverse, Jorj!
cogent jorj

Andrew Brown, writing about the Press in Church Times, has an interesting quote from Financial Times. (No links here to either CT or FT, for both now require payment of a subscription to access their pages: cardinal sin, and offensive to the whole ethos of the Web!)

Religion is the emerging political language of our time. The separation of religious from political thought was invented in the West and exported to the rest of the world in colonial times.

However, most Africans believe in the existence of a spirit world that is distinct but not separate from the material one, one that affects their daily lives. In fact, this is the sense in which people in most continents experience religion, [but] most Westerners do not think of religion in this way. For them, religion is more a matter of ultimate meaning.

I don’t know whether I agree with this or not. But if it’s true, it doesn’t half give the game away. So our daily lives, and the impact on them of a spiritual dimension, have nothing to do with ultimate meaning? No wonder people in the West are desperate, depressed, consumed with greed for money and possessions, addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, anything that takes them out of it for a brief moment. If this is the price we pay for not having to live in a theocracy - come back, Oliver Cromwell!

And speaking of theocracies, who says we’re not getting one in the West, anyway?

Visit the blog that would not allow comments containing the expression ‘Windows’!

At least, it didn’t yesterday … Today I can’t access it at all. Perhaps it’s being ‘mended’, or has been taken out, I mean down, by the Microsoft Thought Police.

Some time I would be interested (but only very slightly) in finding out a thing or two about the people behind spam comments that come my way. I don’t just mean the ‘How do they sleep at night?’ variety of question, as in the current Horlicks ads. I mean, whether there’s any rhyme or reason in the kind of spam they send? Whether there’s some formula for what kind of products or services (is that the right expression?) they are trying to sell, and whose blogs they target with those particular messages? The other day, most of what I was rejecting was about online poker. Today, it has all been debt consolidation. I’m not sure that I understand what either of these are about, and in the case of the German language spam comments, it wasn’t even clear what they were promoting. Oh well, like I say, my interest is too slight to lose any sleep over it.

Boswell mentions my beloved ‘other parish’ of Elsfield in his Life of Johnson:

In the course of this visit (1754), Johnson and I walked, three or four times, to Ellsfield, a village beautifully situated about three miles from Oxford, to see Mr. Wise, Radclivian librarian, with whom Johnson was much pleased. At this place, Mr. Wise had fitted up a house and gardens, in a singular manner, but with great taste. Here was an excellent library; particularly, a valuable collection of books in Northern literature, with which Johnson was often very busy. One day Mr. Wise read to us a dissertation which he was preparing for the press, intitled, “A History and Chronology of the fabulous Ages.” Some old divinities of Thrace, related to the Titans, and called the CABIRI, made a very important part of the theory of this piece; and in conversation afterwards, Mr. Wise talked much of his CABIRI. As we returned to Oxford in the evening, I out-walked Johnson, and he cried out Sufflamina, a Latin word which came from his mouth with peculiar grace, and was as much as to say, Put on your drag chain. Before we got home, I again walked too fast for him; and he now cried out, “Why, you walk as if you were pursued by all the CABIRI in a body.”

One of my parishioners asks me if Dr Wise’s house is still there, and if so, who lives in it?

The answer was, I didn’t know, but as I browsed here and there on the Web, I found this entry:

“ELSFIELD, a parish in Headington district, Oxford; near the river Cherwell, 3 miles S by E of Islip r. station, and 3 NE of Oxford. Post town, Oxford. Acres, 1, 280 Real property, £1, 532. Pop., 179. Houses, 42. The property is all in one estate; and belonged to the Eldsfields, the Hores, the Pudseys, and others. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Oxford. Value, £215. Patron, Col. J. Sidney North. The church is small and good. Charities, £10. Wise, the antiquary, was vicar. “

Was this Wise, the antiquary, the same as Johnson’s friend?

Strickland Gibson, in a paper for the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society on Francis Wise, B. D., Oxford Antiquary, Librarian, and Archivist, confirms that he was. He describes Wise’s garden in Elsfield:

The two large vignettes with which the work is illustrated have a very personal interest. They represent views of Wise’s garden at Elsfield, a small village three miles from Oxford situated on a hill overlooking the Thames Valley and approached through Marston by a straight and rather steep road which, on reaching the village and its purpose fulfilled, winds
bracken-margined along the side of the hill. Elsfield lies as peacefully in its sylvan setting as it did a century and a half ago, but Marston is already doomed. Thrusting roads from the direction of Oxford converge on all sides, and the low-lying meadows which in spring were once yellow with cowslips, and thickets which but two or three years since were the haunt of the blackcap and the nightingale, are now being reclaimed and devoted with all possible speed to the higher purposes of man.

Wise first became interested in Elsfield about 1738, and obtained a lease of some land from the Earl of Guilford. What Wise particularly valued was ‘a little piece of ground, which had formerly been a garden, with two ponds in it,’ and in a less degree ‘a marshy bit of ground heretofore a pond, now a spinney, lying at the bottom of Homestead Close.’ This little piece of ground, which belonged to property leased to a certain William Morris, ‘it was thought no injury to defalcate’ and include in Wise’s lease. Some peddling attorney, however, had ‘unadvisedly’ made its reversion expectant on the death of Morris. Wise therefore asked his Lordship that when a new lease was drawn up, the piece of land might be attached to it unconditionally. This seemingly unpromising property was gradually and lovingly developed into an elaborate garden. The merits of the defalcation are not to be determined, but all true gardeners will share Wise’s distaste of reversions expectant since any limitation of years is intolerable to those who, ever hopefully looking forward from season to season, feel in themselves ‘bright shoots of everlastingness.’

These interesting garden works are, as far as we know, part of the grounds of what is now Elsfield Manor House.

Ain’t it wonderful, what you can find out on the Web?

The Deanery Party brings a request / invitation / opportunity to tell a story as part of the entertainment. And a whole new lot of reasons to be nervous. For these are colleagues and others who have been aware of my reinventing myself as a storyteller, and subsequently claiming to be one, but haven’t experienced what it’s like to hear me tell. Will they know how to listen? - which I personally found a much harder art, than actually telling. Also, it’s not like the musical items we have sometimes had as entertainment in other years. You can carry on talking while someone’s playing the piano - it may not be very polite, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent the piano being played. But unless people listen to a story, the story can’t be told.

Well, they listened, and I told the disturbing story I heard Katrice Horsley tell, which I think of as ‘Kate’s Story’. But haven’t much sense of what they (including the Bishop and the retiring Archdeacon) made of it.

Alan Bennett says that when he was a child his family had a terrible secret. It was the same secret that every other family had. It was that they were not normal.

I think about this when I watch BBC’s Child of Our Time. I can’t watch it without blubbing. All the families, children, parents are just so different from us, so strange, so not normal - so like us. Over and over it makes me think about our parenting. We made the choices we made, we did what we did, with the resources available to us. We could have been better parents. But we were good enough. I hope. Our children are in the world. They look like they’re going to make their way in it, for better or for worse. Isn’t that all that parenting is, or can be, about?

Grrr! After all that waiting in, ANC didn’t come and collect this packet. No explanation from the depot when I rang at 4 p.m. Just that the driver had already been and gone. Presumably with some lame story that he hadn’t been able to find the vicarage. Van drivers don’t seem to have a lot of persistence: far too many of them give up with the slightest excuse.

And this is called a ’service’. I’m not quite sure in what sense, that would be.

A story waiting to be told: In one of those Lost Reference Books, I read about King Zog, who became King of Albania in 1928. (Albania had initially been a republic after becoming independent in 1912 following the Balkan Wars.) The entry said that the throne had first been offered to the distinguished English cricketer Charles Burgess Fry.

In his absorbing autobiography, Life Worth Living, published in 1939, Fry told of how he very nearly became the King of Albania. His association with Ranjitsinhji led him to occupy the position of substitute delegate for India at the Assemblies of the League of Nations at Geneva, where he composed a speech delivered by Ranji which turned Mussolini out of Corfu.

The Albanians sent a delegation and appointed a Bishop, who bore a striking resemblance to W. G. Grace, to find an English country gentlemen with £10,000 a year for their King. Fry had the first qualification but not the second; but Ranji certainly could have provided the money. “If I had really pressed Ranji to promote me,” said Fry, “it is quite on the cards that I should have been King of Albania yesterday, if not today.”

But, what an idea! How might the history of Europe have been different, if a cricketer had been King of Albania before the Second World War? (Not all that much, one suspects. But it does sound altogether too too Ruritanian.)

I’m having one of those frustrating days when you have to wait in the whole day for an ‘Authorised Return’ to be collected by the carrier. In this case, the latest wireless router which has not worked in our house, because it doesn’t recognise a broadband signal. There was the usual haggling between help lines: the product’s technical help desk adviser saying he thought it was because there was too much noise on the line, and this router was more sensitive than the cable ADSL modem I use at present (and in any case, he admitted, he himself uses another wireless router - but as it happened that was the same one I had tried previously and it hadn’t worked, either) and the broadband provider’s help desk saying, No, the signal was perfectly fine as far as they were concerned. Then there was another saga finding someone at the end of a line who knew how I could return a piece of equipment: most of them are only trained to send you back to the first endless loop. Then, when you receive the Mystic Labels and wrap up the goods - by this time heartily sick of them and glad to see the back of them - you have to phone the carrier and arrange a day for collection.

Naturally, they cannot specify a morning or afternoon time. This seems odd, as they always seem to come at around the same time of day when you’re in. It’s only when you have had to go out for some reason that they suddenly change their routine and come at the opposite end of the day. (cf Sod’s Law)

So, what to do with a day - a day off, to boot - when you can’t do any of the things you might plan if you don’t have to wait in for the carrier? Answer: De-frost the freezer. This turns out to be one of those jobs that you don’t think better of until it’s way too late. And you beat yourself up with the thought: If only I did it two or three times a year, instead of once every two or three years…

I think there’s a sermon illustration here, but I can’t think what for at present.

The other, more exciting activity was that I found some lost reference books. The kind of things you get as special offers for joining book clubs and probably never look at, and which in our house tend to get put Out of the Way during some clearing-up or other, and never put back. But I find I’ve got one or two really interesting ones, like the Oxford Encyclopedia of World History, the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. (It’s no coincidence that more than one of these have been edited by David Crystal: good man!)

When I was young I used to spend many happy hours browsing in reference books, nowadays the only one I read fairly routinely is the Dictionary. But I must get into the habit of reading these particular reference books. I have a feeling I could definitely learn something.

Comment on another post I’m in process of writing. See

Murphy’s Laws Site

Sod’s Law: a rocket scientist writes…

But my favourite story is the one in which a team of scientists are investigating Sod’s Law and observe that for one particular man, the toast never falls on the floor butter side down. Always, only, ever, butter side up. After much soul-searching and thought they discover the reason: the subject in question invariably buttered his toast on the wrong side.

After days, weeks, (months?) of ploughing through the high seas of narrative of volume 2 of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, I am like a lookout catching a distant glimpse of a land bird, far from the shore; and I know that within days the land itself will come in sight.

It is a narrative which invites these huge and epic figures: the Telegraph described the first volume as ‘a great, heaving countryside of a book, massive in scope and littered with treasure.’ Mostly my voyage has been with great enjoyment. There has been rather too much of Half-cocked Jack Shaftoe, the king of the vagabonds, for my liking, with his picaresque adventures on the Barbary and Malabar Coasts. And I didn’t much like the oppressive splendour of the court of Leroy, (Louis XIV) - though the fact I found it so ghastly, indicates how well Stephenson creates it, perhaps. I preferred the thread concerning Daniel Waterhouse, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and Eliza, Duchess of Qwghlm. No doubt all these threads will come together by the end of volume 3.

But I’ve been struck by how much one small but persistent little quirk of style can cause you to trip up over and over and over again, and momentarily slip from enjoyment into exasperation. In this case, it’s the way Stephenson uses the word ’shall’.

Now when I was being taught grammar at school - in ye olde days - I was told that the future tense was formed thus:
I shall do, we shall do
you will do
he/she/it will do, they will do

i.e. ‘Shall’ was used for the simple future, in the first person singular and plural.

But when it was a future tense which conveyed deliberation, determination, powerful volition, exhortation, ’shall’ and ‘will’ were reversed:

I will do it, we will do it
you shall do it
he/she/it/they shall do it

The extreme danger of getting this usage wrong was illustrated for us in the tragic and cautionary tale of the German visitor to the English seaside, who, getting into difficulties in the water, cried out, “I will drown, and no one shall save me!” The English spectators, respecting his determination to make an end of himself, stood politely by and let him drown.

Now Neal Stephenson, in direct speech, uses the auxiliary ’shall’ in the second and third persons exclusively and indiscriminately, regardless of the degree of simple futurity or compulsion. He may be correct, in having his characters speak like that in the late 17th century: I’m sure he’s done an enormous amount of research for this huge novel. But I don’t think so: I think he just thinks it’s a more archaic, formal or quaint style of speaking than we use nowadays. But it doesn’t help me when I’m puzzling over whether the speaker is simply using a future tense, or expressing that insistence or compulsion towards the people spoken to or about.

Jakob Nielsen is one of the most interesting and useful writers on writing for the Web.

See his latest at Durability of Usability Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

However seductive the present might be, writing for the Web is writing for the ages, not just for the moment. (People who post stream-of-consciousness entries in their weblogs, for example, might want to consider that they’re also writing for managers who might hire them in twenty years.)

I shall have retired by then, but there’s still a point to be taken about what we blog and its present and future readership.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Tories set to unveil tax cut plan

Leader Charles Kennedy cited his party’s opposition to the Iraq war, ID cards and tuition fees as evidence that the Lib Dems are the “authentic opposition”.

In view of this, yet further, evidence of the absolute moral and ideological bankruptcy of the Tories, I think Kennedy is right. If the Tories, after 7 years in opposition, haven’t come up with anything more inspirational than yet more about tax cutting, they deserve to be consigned to another 5 years in the political wilderness.

We don’t want tax cuts. We want a fair system of taxation by which the wealthy carry a greater burden of taxation - not find ways of evading or avoiding it. We want essential services for the population, especially the elderly and vulnerable, to be paid for out of the public purse. We want a Tory party that will rediscover a vision for the rich to take responsibility, instead of wallowing in their selfishness and privilege. (OK, scrap this last one: it really is wishing for the moon.)

Just discovered this site today: This Is Broken. I particularly liked the curious traffic sign.