Storyteller’s World

On top of the Wrekin, 2

Originally uploaded by Tonus Peregrinus.

According to the books, a true Shropshire born woman or man is never lost, so long as s/he can see the Wrekin. As incomers, we’ve only just learned to recognise the thing; and even then only from the places we’ve seen it from before, viz. chiefly the Long Mynd, and the Stretton Hills. But this Bank Holiday we thought we’d go for a drive and see it for ourselves.

It turns out to be a kind of pilgrimage for the folk of Shropshire, particularly the urban dwellers of Telford. The top of the Wrekin, and the paths leading up to it, are like Piccadilly Circus, compared with the top of the Long Mynd. And all human life is there: whining infants, wingeing pre-teens, stressed parents, complicated families, and those of us with the children off our hands, thinking to ourselves “Thank goodness it’s not us having to deal with these brats” alternating with, “Here, this is a bit steep; hope the old ticker can stand it.”

The following morning the radio weather forecaster says, “The Bank Holiday weather didn’t disappoint for all of us.” The meaning of this gnomic utterance still eludes me. I thought the weather was really rather nice. Does that mean the weather did disappoint, for a Bank Holiday?

According to yesterday’s Observer: How to be clever: eat lots of beans and avoid football; the best kind of breakfast brain-food you can eat is baked beans on toast. But if you can’t face beans in the morning, the next best thing is Marmite on toast. Yay!

Further tips for keeping the brain healthy include not watching too much football (though I guess American football rather than soccer might be meant.)

Then there is the simple issue of ‘using it or losing it’. Failure to keep your brain stimulated will cause cognitive decay. As the US writer Erma Bombeck once claimed: ‘Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.’

Try learning a musical instrument, which could have a major impact on your thinking. ‘Six-year-old children who were given music lessons, as opposed to drama lessons or no extra instruction, got a 2-to-3 point boost in IQ scores compared with the others,’ says the magazine. Simply listening to stories, such as radio’s A Book at Bedtime, also provides a boost to performance, as do puzzles, such as crosswords.

Boost someone’s brain power today: tell them a story!

Is that all? Surely there must be more? The wonder of it is that anyone’s blog manages to get found and read by anyone … John Naughton in today’s Observer Business (Media) says Journalists must stop being in denial: bloggers are here to stay

There are thoughtful blogs, silly blogs, truthful blogs, fanatical blogs, ideological blogs, biased blogs, knowledgeable blogs - just as there are thoughtful, silly, fanatical, ideological, biased and knowledgeable books. Not to mention newspapers and magazines: when was the last time you believed anything you read in the Sunday Sport ?

Hmm, which of those do I aspire to be? Thoughtful, yes. Maybe funny rather than silly. Truthful, of course, like any storyteller. Fanatical - what do you mean, I’m an Anglican for heaven’s sake!? Ideological, biased? I may change my mind about all sorts of things, but what hasn’t changed is that I’m still right. Knowledgeable? Only in the Socratic sense: the only thing I know is that I know nothing. But believable - certainly more so than the Sunday Sport, I hope.

This is what I call a blog! When I read this entry just now: Security Awareness for Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless: Mad as Hell: I - Switching to Mac there were 146 comments!

Carolyn came to me a few weeks ago and asked for some more copies of the Elsfield church history leaflet, which we’ve run out of. “And while you’re doing it, can you add a paragraph about the village room, to bring it up to date.”

The existing church history was written by my predecessor nearly 25 years ago, and reprinted by me (with added spelling errors and omitted words) in 2001. Once I started trying to “bring it up to date”, I quickly realised it was turning into a complete rewrite.

But how do you write a church history? There are so many things you want it to be, that really it needs to be available in different forms, like on Doctor Who’s psychic notepaper, so as to meet the unique needs of each reader.

You want it to have some information about the architectural history of the building (”the spandrels of the S.E. narthex clerestory window are thought to have been designed by Adam of Clairvaux c.1297 to satisfy the requirements of the then abbot of Bluny, but this is disputed by the Bluniac Conservation Society”) for people who like that kind of thing (if there still are any such people).

You want it to convey some idea that this is a living place of prayer and worship, and why this matters.

You want it to be readable, for God’s sake, and not quite as dull dull dull as most of these offerings.

But when you set out to try and write something that is all these things to all these people, you find yourself inexorably slipping into dull and boring. Even occasional linguistic shockers don’t quite wake it up.

Someone once said one of the purposes of a blog was to get comments on ideas from a wider readership. So in case any of you are feeling hardy enough to withstand Dull, you’re welcome to read the draft of the Elsfield Church History, and leave your comments here at Storyteller’s World.

I cried when I read this.

If you haven’t read Tony’s story about what happened at Worth Abbey, it’s well worth it. It provides his summary of what was going on during the 6 weeks he took part in the adventure we shared with them at The Monastery.

Finker has posted a reflection about Michael Vasey’s Strangers and Friends, one of the most moving, and helpful, contributions to the sexuality debate, and I promised myself I would post my most precious memory of Michael.

When I was an ordinand at Cranmer Hall back in the 1970s, we didn’t discuss the gay issue. If any of you can remember the 70s, it just wasn’t a matter of curiosity or big discussion: there was a kind of courtesy in the Church back then, which respected people’s private lives. Nobody “knew” Michael was gay; yet when we heard about it, it was no surprise, we realised we had “known” all along, and it hadn’t made a jot of difference. (Sometimes I regret the loss of that innocence.)

Michael was the tutor who taught me all I know - no, taught me all I was taught - about liturgy (the rest I’ve had to learn by doing it.) And that included some of the most useful things. I once asked him how you could read or say the same set words of the liturgy week in week out, without them just going stale and dead on you, like they seem to be in some people’s mouths. He answered, “Say them like you mean them, as if they were the newest, most exciting and important words that anyone could say. And visualise what you’re talking about, as if it’s happening right in front of you.” I quite often think of those words when the liturgy is being “difficult”, and it always lifts it to a higher level.

Michael may be lost to the community of liturgists, but not to the community of worship: he’s surely part of that company of heaven with whom we proclaim God’s glory: Holy! holy! holy!

This morning a letter from the Labour Party arrives. Not “Thank you for voting for us and helping to win a historic third term.” (They don’t know how I voted.) But a request for even more money (plus Direct Debit form!) to help replenish the depleted campaign coffers. It’s not the redundant apostrophe that upsets and offends me. (”As you would have seen if you lived in a marginal constituency*, the Conservative’s (sic) spent a fortune in the last few days to try to influence the result…”) It’s the fact that all over the envelope and top of the letter it states it comes from Leader’s Office. And is signed by Tony Blair, Leader of the Labour Party.

Am I the only Labour supporter who feels more than a bit queasy about Blair calling himself The Leader? Kind of in bad taste? One or two negative connotations? Not to say the teensiest bit of megalomania?

* It turned out to be more marginal than you might think: our Labour MP had his majority cut from more than 10,000 to less than 1,000. This in a constituency that was held by Labour even in the dark days of Thatcher.

Is this further evidence that using MS Windows (and especially still using Internet Explorer) destroys the brain?

BBC NEWS | Technology | Trojan holds PC files for ransom

If a kidnapper demanded you pay a ransom into their bank account and gave you details of how to do it, wouldn’t they be caught in very short order? So how, if this story isn’t an April Fool, is it possible for criminals to get any money out of this? Unless PC users are indeed more stupid than your average person. Or is it the law that’s stupid, by there being some way in which whatever is going on here is not criminal? Oh, I know, it’s probably someone’s Constitutional right (to freedom of speech? self expression? free trade? making an honest buck?) to be able to invade another person’s computer with their own software, and re-write the invadee’s files. It’s only a microcosm of what has gone on between nations since the Year Dot.

Nkosi Sikeleli Africa
Malup hakanyiswu phando lwayo
Yiswa imithanda zo yethu
Nkosi Sikelela
Thina lusapo lwayo.

Africa is a kind of blind spot in my psyche. I’ve never been there, can’t imagine ever going there, look at the news of wars, famines, corruption and despotism, genocides, religious hatred and massacres, HIV/AIDS pandemics - and despair. How can we pray for a continent? How can we hope that things will change? The Bruce Willis character in Tears of the Sun says “God has abandoned Africa”, and you know you don’t, can’t dare, believe it - yet in the context of the film it seems so plausible.

Yet the people I know who have been there, lived there, just love Africa; so many of them can’t wait to return in spite of all the (what looks to me like) terrible darkness and dangers. I have to tell myself: it is not a place. It’s a continent of places, far more diverse probably than Europe. I should pray for Africa, and know that God has not abandoned it, but loves the peoples of Africa with infinite, patient, longing, cruciform love.

Today is the BBC’s Day in Africa, one small part of the Africa 05 celebrations.

Christianity is contracting in Europe and North America, and that, too, is because of the impact of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists have managed to convince many people that the real Christian message is a literalistic one about the violent end of the world and the miraculous salvation of a few people with fantastic beliefs. Consequently, the majority of Western people have turned away from Christianity, as irrelevant to their hopes and concerns. So in the West as in the rest of the world it is important to distinguish Bible teaching and evangelicalism from fundamentalism, and expose the errors of fundamentalist interpretation.

Keith Ward, What the Bible Really Teaches, p.181

I used the opportunity provided by back pain to try and finish some of the Christian books I started and put aside. One of them is Keith Ward’s. Apparently someone’s been trying to kill off Christianity, and it turns out on the penultimate page (when Keith does his Poirot impression) that it was the fundamentalists all along.

The last couple of days I’ve had a bit of the lower back pain that visits from time to time. It’s astonishingly debilitating, because it rapidly moves to the forefront of consciousness, and becomes all you can think about. One of the worst things about moderate pain is the fear: fear of the pain; fear of it getting worse; fear of the chiropractor’s bills if you end up having to have treatment over a period of weeks. The consequence of the fear is that all the surrounding muscles tighten up, and pretty soon it’s as if your whole body has gone into spasm. (Not just the hip bone connected to the thigh bone, but the neck muscle connected very closely to the gluteus maximus, and your whole body becomes an Ache.)

What would be really helpful in this situation is something to distract the brain from the pain. Parish work doesn’t quite do it. I could try taking time off and going to the cinema; but the seats there are so uncomfortable it would be like treating a paper cut by amputating your hand. So it’s back to the ibuprofen, the ice pack out of the freezer, and a double dose of medicinal whisky before bed.

As a long-time user of OpenOffice.org, and Star Office before it, I was really pleased to come across NeoOffice/J 1.1 Release Candidate, on the cover disc of July 2005 MacWorld.

It works in Mac OS X without having to use the X11 windowing system, which was always a palaver and slowed things down some. Great stuff!

What’s the good of learning new words if you can’t use them?

I first heard mingin’ from Sun, a few months ago; which means it’s teen talk she picks up from and maybe even uses with her students. Then a day or two ago I heard it in the trailer for a TV drama, spoken by an adult. It sounds like a ‘bad’ word, meaning dirty, disgusting, gross, etc. But then you can never tell: it can probably also be used, with teenage irony, to describe what’s good and desirable and what you aspire to be.

How do words come into popular, widespread use, and where from? This isn’t even a ‘new’ word; it’s already in the COED:

minging, adj. Brit. informal foul-smelling, very bad or unpleasant
ORIGIN C20: perh. from Scots. dial. ming ‘excrement’

minger, n. Brit. informal, derogatory an unattractive or unpleasant person or thing

But also (is this related, and if so, is it just another instance of linguistic misogyny?):

minge, n. Brit. vulgar slang a woman’s pubic hair or genitals
ORIGIN C19: of unknown origin

When and where was the word mingin’ first used in a blog? Possibly here, in calima’s musings of a curious little yankee? She reports its use in Glasgow. But it’s also popular among Southwark teenagers (closer to Sun’s home ground).

You can even take a quiz to find out whether you are blingin’ or mingin’. I came out middlin’ mingin’ - “Could do better”! (Though some of it took some guesswork to try to imagine myself into youth culture.) But it’s still a word you’re not likely to hear in a sermon from me, in the very near future.

New definitions:

wisteria, n. an extreme feeling of vague or regretful longing, often connected with nostalgia, or unlikely-to-be-fulfilled ambitions.
DERIVATIVES: wisterical, adj. e.g. “he became completely wisterical after reading the sixteenth volume of his old diaries …”

Richard Burridge’s Four Gospels, One Jesus is an excellent book, but sometimes the editor must have been nodding.

Unfortunately [for Jesus’ enemies, the crucifixion] was not [the end of the story]; fired by their belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead, his followers expanded rapidly - and so we move into the history of the early Christian communities and their eventual separation from Judaism.
p.170

A kind of spiritual ‘Supersize me’?

Lots of people over here loved the TV coverage of George Galloway’s appearance in front of last week’s Senate committee that had found him guilty of illegally benefiting from trading with Iraq. I’m one of the many who really don’t like Galloway much, but just can’t help being impressed by his brass nerve.

Richard Ingrams in the Observer (another character I don’t care for much of the time) comments:

Thus it was noted that Galloway’s telling remark that, contrary to what was alleged, he had met Saddam Hussein no more often than Donald Rumsfeld (who had actually sold him weapons), this was not reported the following day in two of America’s most prestigious papers, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

So, once again, for those who didn’t see it in their own press: George Galloway met Saddam Hussein on fewer occasions than Donald Rumsfeld. The only difference was, Rumsfeld was selling him weapons at the time.

This is one of those stories where I definitely want to say: Pass it on!

Consider these two headlines:

STRUGGLING FIRST-TIME BUYERS TO GET HELP FROM GOVERNMENT

TAXPAYERS TO FUND CUT-PRICE MORTGAGES

One of these was the lead headline on the front page of the Observer today. It wasn’t the first one. Shame on you, Observer! to put such a Tory spin on a story like this. Considering the facts: that in some parts of the country house prices are now eight times the average salary, and that nurses, teachers, firefighters (and, one might add, clergy *) are now unable to afford homes in 9 out of 10 British towns, the housing situation is a scandal that ought to be sorted out by the Government. If they can’t peg the ridiculous rise in house prices, they ought to use taxpayers’ money (say, a property tax on homes over £300,000?) to help those who aren’t able to enjoy the benefits of this society of owner-occupiers.

* The low level of clergy stipends is often justified on the basis that the “free house” that goes with the job is worth an extra £6,000 to £7,000 a year. Sure, but at the end of the day (when you retire) you’re left with nothing; and if you can’t get a mortgage on a clergy stipend, you sure as hell won’t on a clergy pension. This is why the Church of England is even more subsidised than ever by working spouses, and late ordinands who already have a foot on the property ladder.

Kitchen Cutlery Drawer

Originally uploaded by Tonus Peregrinus.

So here’s the kitchen cutlery drawer, with the evidence (top centre to right) that the table cutlery is arranged in the order Spoons, Forks, Knives. I can see the logic of this for a right-hander, that knives should be to the right of forks. But not necessarily that spoons are to the left of both. OK, if you only have dessert spoons; but if the way you set them out on the table is the deciding factor, what about the soup spoons?

Anyway, my grand theory would have been, that we arrange our cutlery the way Mother did back home. Ali’s comment is evidence in favour of that; laura’s against. Too small a sample to draw any conclusions … so I’ll need to do my snooping when visiting, after all.

But what about this for weird further evidence:

Dining Room Cutlery

Originally uploaded by Tonus Peregrinus.

In our dining room dresser, the ‘best’ cutlery is arranged like this, from L. to R.

• Corkscrews, bottle-stops, serving-slices
• Spoons (soup, tea, and dessert)
• Knives and forks (small)
• Knives and forks (large)
• Salad servers, chopsticks (and what’s that? another corkscrew?)

Knives and forks are mixed up in two of the drawers because it’s easier to distinguish them from each other at a glance, than it is to distinguish large forks from small forks, ditto. We’ve got quite accustomed to this arrangement; but it has been known to really upset and confuse some visitors.

Objects of Affection

Originally uploaded by Tonus Peregrinus.

Moleskine notebook, Fisher Space Pen, Tilley hat and Leki trekking poles - with me on Caer Caradoc, May 3, 2005

I’ve only just discovered this guy, via Arts & Letters Daily. He seems to talk a lot of sense. Check out his piece on the Super-Rich as the real scroungers Blunkett should be going after (and naturally didn’t have in mind.)

And this horrifying article on sex slavery, surely one of the most evil abuses of our time. I so much applaud the idea that any man who uses a prostitute without making sure she is doing it of her own free will, should be considered guilty of rape and treated accordingly.

No doubt it’s something to do with the limits of the BBC News web-site in reporting any news, but I’m still seething over that report that Ruth Kelly is looking for simple solutions to the problems in schools, “that could be replicated everywhere”. It’s bad enough that the Labour Government have continued to bugger up education, chiefly by carrying on their predecessors’ policies and continuously meddling and measuring instead of giving teachers the resources to get on and do the job. But even under the Tories you got the impression that ministers understood that there were a whole lot of complex factors which helped determine whether schools were “succeeding” or “failing”. They include (just off the top of anyone’s head):

• The quality and unique personality of the head teacher
• The staff you can appoint there, or it may be, who can afford to live there
• Geography
• The demographic nature of the catchment area: wealth and class factors
• Competition: what others schools there are in the area

That’s without even thinking about the larger cultural context. Because many of the real problems with education (in England, not so much in Scotland) come from the general contempt in which education and teaching are held. If we really valued them, it wouldn’t be possible to pay teachers the pittance they get in comparison with, say, investment bankers, solicitors, architects. It wouldn’t be possible for people to joke about how bad they were at school in maths or science - they would, rather, be embarrassed about it. It wouldn’t be possible for education to be regarded as a commodity which the rich could buy a better standard of, by sending their children to private schools. We would abolish private education and do our damnedest to make sure all our children got equal opportunities and were taught by the prevailing culture to value and long for education.

Occasionally you may hear a Labour minister talking about “equality of opportunity”. And then what do they do? Send their children to private schools!

You wonder, don’t you, if there are any depths to which a UK Government - even a ‘Labour’ one - is capable of sinking?

British aid money is being used to push water privatisation on poor countries - making it less likely that clean water will ever get to the poorest people. And while poor people lose out, a group of big UK companies are profiting from this aid.

World Development Movement | Aid

Some time ago I commented on the fact that I have never lived alone, and maggi (for example) found it hard to believe … But I think it’s related to this unbelievable accident of my life, that I have also never filled a cutlery drawer, starting from scratch. When I replace the clean cutlery after washing up, there’s always some already there to give me clues about where stuff lives.

So I had never really reflected about this, until we set up our new home at The Flat, and one day I noticed that the cutlery drawer was arranged, uncannily, in just the same order as here at the Vicarage. Like this: on the left, Spoons; in the middle, Forks; on the right, Knives.

I said to Alison, “Hey, the cutlery’s arranged just the same as at home!”

“Of course it is.”

“Why do you do it that way?”

“Because it’s the right way.”

I had a theory about this. So when Alison’s big sister came to visit, I asked her how she arranged her cutlery drawer. Guess what? On the left, Spoons; in the middle, Forks; on the right, Knives.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s the right way.”

The trouble with answers like that is, they totally torpedo scientific enquiry, so I was never able to verify or disprove my theory. But I’d love to hear how other people arrange their cutlery drawers, and why?

(The alternative is that whenever I’m doing pastoral visiting, instead of making some excuse to visit the loo, like the detectives do, and then searching the bedroom for incriminating evidence, I shall be out in the kitchen rifling the cutlery drawers.)

All schools must develop a culture of respect with the methods of the best to be repeated across the country, says Education Secretary Ruth Kelly.

An expert group will look at how some schools are deemed to be succeeding.

Ms Kelly said her plans were not rocket science but she hoped the panel could identify three or four success stories that could be rolled out everywhere.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Group to tackle unruly students

If it were as simple as some trick or technique “that could be rolled out everywhere”, rather than an astonishing gift of personal character, patience, sheer love for their subject and the people they teach, charisma, etc. - well then, any fool could teach, instead of the brilliant and gifted people who actually do.

Just like any fool can be a politician - an Education Secretary, say - and come out with tosh like this.

I know the clergy around Llanfihangel
are sometimes out of sorts with the full
Morning and Evening Prayer, said each day.
My suggestion is that they sing
even alone in church, what they always say.
It doesn’t have to be Purcell
or Pelham Humphryes; anything
that touches the fancy will sound well
and return a relish to praying.

From David Scott, ‘Bishop Taylor’s remedies against tediousness of spirit’; quoted in George Guiver’s Company of Voices.

It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be very interesting.

But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over weddings and funerals but also to say something thought-provoking to large numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the profession of philosophy.

I still think of this as the priest’s highest calling - or at least the most interesting part of the job.

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon. p. 398.

That’s one of the things I love about Neal Stephenson. Halfway through reading a cyberthriller (well, not even halfway, actually) you suddenly find a comment that informs and inspires your whole vocational identity.