Storyteller’s World

I’m finding this news about the trial of the murderers of Anthony Walker so deeply depressing; primarily that there can be such evil people in the world. It’s beyond imagination or comprehension.

BBC NEWS | England | Merseyside | Youth guilty of racist axe murder

But there are so many questions the news isn’t answering. According to the TV news, these racist thugs were smoking cannabis in the Huyton Park pub, opposite the bus stop where they saw their victim and began shouting racist abuse. What does this say about legalising cannabis? And what’s happened to the pub? Has it been closed down, and its landlord charged with being an accessory to murder? Were they no other people around who saw what was happening and - OK, you’re not going to intervene when there are people like these armed with ice axes and stoned out of their skulls - but surely, someone could have phoned the police?

No wonder the killing has shocked the whole community. It should shock every community, to realise how little we care for each other.

I’m having a look at Ubuntu, which was on the cover disc of the current Linux User & Developer, and which I’ve installed on the desktop what I built two years ago, that has been standing more or less idle since I got into Mac OS. It has quite an attractive appearance, but uses Gnome as default, where I have been used to SuSe and KDE. Also a whole new lot of applications - or different ones - since I last used Linux.

And I’m also looking at OpenOffice.org 2.0, which is part of the Ubuntu package anyway, but I’ve also installed it on the iBook.

One of the regrets of my incumbency, probably, should be that I have not given as much comfort and succour as I could (should?) have done, to all the local hostelries, taverns, or pubs. When I came here 15 years ago, there were 6 pubs in the parish. Now, alas, there are only 5: the sixth has been turned inside out, its paddock built upon, and the whole turned into a small development of unaffordable housing.

And now I find that one of the remaining five has new (reduced) opening hours, from November 1st:
Monday to Thursday: 3 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Friday and Saturday: 12 noon to 11 p.m.
Sunday: 12 noon to 10.30 p.m.

Clearly, the spectre of 24 hour drinking isn’t yet stalking the streets of Marston. So with any luck, we may not have to start a Marston Chapter of the Temperance League. Just yet.

A morning with Anamchara, talking about the emotional and spiritual maelstrom that is my life at present, helps in a gruelling kind of way. And then I begin to wonder, as usual, whether the glimpse it affords of life being all-of-a-piece is authentic, or just kinda hokey.

One of the things that comes out of this morning’s reflection is an astonishing congruence of griefs.

We all grieved for Dad for about two years before he died, while he was moving away from us, no longer the lively, lovely man he had always been, but something else, as if he was already re-locating large parts of who he was to another world.

And suddenly I felt that this was a kind of parallel the grief I feel for the Church. I love the Church of England. There is no other way I can conceive of being a Christian, than as an Anglican. Yet now the Church (the worldwide Anglican Communion) has become something different. It is no longer the Church I fell in love with, but something alien, a body diseased and riven apart with self-hatred, where limbs and organs that think they are strong are actually no longer serving the body, but tearing it apart; while those that are truly healthy seem weak and ineffective. Result: the beauty that I love has become invisible even to ourselves, let alone those who look on. People turn away in scorn or disgust, unable to understand how anyone can still remain faithful to this raddled fright.

And then to see that this is not my grief, but the heartache and heartbreak God feels when he looks at what we, his Church, have become. The thought that my sadness is a pale reflection of God’s, doesn’t actually make it a bit easier to bear.

It’s that time of year again, when I print off the calendar of sunrise and sunset times, and start ticking off the days, like a schoolboy ticking off the days till the school holidays, until it stops getting darker, and the earth begins to spin into the light once more.

This is where I need the link to the Sunrise and Sunset Calendar.

And not content with any ‘near enough’ option of having a sunrise and sunset calendar for the nearest city, London or whatever, I have to know the latitude and longitude of Oxford so as to produce a custom calendar. So I know that Carfax Tower (that’s near enough, just about) is 51 degrees, 45 minutes and 07 seconds North, and 1 degree, 15 minutes and 28 seconds West.

What, obsessive? Moi?

John Naughton writes in the Observer about The Flickr phenomenon

And this is where you can see my Flickr photos.

From the You Couldn’t Make It Up Department:

At the same time as Clooney has embarked on his political activism, the actor has also gone into the casino business in Las Vegas. He has invested in Las Ramblas, a new complex aiming to recapture the glamour of the city before Las Vegas became a mass tourism destination. However, 25 per cent of the profits he makes from his casino venture will be donated to Make Poverty History.

The Observer | Focus | How a heart-throb became the voice of liberal America

Now, I love George Clooney as much as the next man, but I wanted to greet this with a hoot of COME OFF IT, GEORGE!

Is it really helping the world’s poor, to divert the profits of one of the most evil, corrupt, criminal, life-destroying industries in the world? Haven’t you heard of ethical investment, which is going to produce something useful, as well as profits? They must have ethical investments, somewhere, in the U S of A? Or what about even investing in some low return investment in a poor part of the world?

Must be something wrong with these alternative suggestions. Like, they don’t make such a fanfare when you’re trying to get into politics.

It’s as well I’m able to do my serious shopping on another day of the week, because Saturday in the centre of Oxford is a treat I can only bear so much of. Even when I’m feeling in a satirical mood.

Today Alison and I were in town for lunch at All Bar One - a Saturday treat we allow ourselves particularly when we haven’t spent much time together for a week or two - and I followed this up with a walk in Cornmarket. An hour or two of this, if you had the stamina, would provide more than enough material for a 50,000 NaNoWriMo fiction, if not two or three.

There are the usual charitable and religious travelling stalls: collectors for Christian Aid, free information about Islam, young men trying to sell books on self-realization. (”Aargh, help me, doctor: I’ve just realised myself!”) There’s a group of about a dozen young women in pink, singing a cappella in aid of I could not discern what.

Then there are the animal rights terrorists, picketing Vodaphone with a large notice saying: VODAPHONE SUPPORTS OXFORD ANIMAL LABORATORY. You almost want to rush inside and say, Cancel my Orange subscription and sign me up! Two policemen are filming and photographing the apparently mild-mannered women holding the poster. As well they might, for these are all tacit accessories to a campaign of death threats against people who work for Oxford businesses, and supporters of grave-robbers. Filming them somehow doesn’t even come close to a measured response.

Then, just at the corner of St Michael’s Street, there’s the Fox FM road-show which is a huge contraption blocking three-quarters of the street, already crowded with shoppers. From both directions, the throng of pedestrians is funnelled down to a point, and where the two points meet head-on, no one can move, and no one is giving way or even able to. At some distance from this mayhem, council employees in luminous yellow jackets are controlling the event by looking on and wringing their hands. I don’t know what Fox FM are paying the City Fathers to hold this shambles, but it isn’t enough. All the shops north of Ship Street might like to know they didn’t get my custom today, thanks to Fox FM.

I wouldn’t believe most of this stuff, if I wasn’t writing it myself.

OK, not a t-shirt exactly - but I’ve got the offical NaNoWriMo winner’s icon on the sidebar. And the winner’s certificate on my wall.

A story.

On this day, 35 years ago, I bought this book in Blackwell’s:

Between then and the end of the year, I read it from cover to cover. Until that time, I had always thought of myself as a Christian, even when I was going through a pantheist or agnostic phase - though I never went to church of course, that would have been far too religious. When I read the New Testament, I realised nominalism wasn’t going to be an option for me any more: I had to decide whether I believed it or didn’t. And if I did believe it, I had to face the fact that it was going to change my life.

The Beginning

“Oh, yes you did,” says Akinola. Or at least, you agreed with what the letter said, which is the same as signing it. Or at least, you didn’t dissent from it, which is the same as agreeing with it. How far can this go? I ask myself. It’s already got as far as (though he might not actually have said it yet): Anyone who claims to be a Christian must agree with me. What next? It doesn’t matter what the Bible says about anything; it is so because I say so? I am God, worship me?

Church Times - ‘Signatories’ of Akinola letter say they didn’t sign

Archbishop Akinola insisted: “While every person is entitled to a change of opinion, the incontrovertible and indisputable fact remains that at our meeting in El Sukhna, the first draft of the response was circulated to all present to peruse, and give us any additional input or objection. It is pertinent to say NO ONE objected. All those that responded will see that the final draft reflected their inputs.”

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Sharon’s party: What’s in a name?

A Prime Minister and party leader leaves the party, and sets up a new one of his own? Because over his years in office his policies have diverged so much from those of the rest of the party, and he often overrides the wishes of his Cabinet colleagues? And this position has become untenable?

What an incredibly bizarre idea. It could never happen here.

Where do you emigrate to, when the whole world goes mad?

BBC NEWS | UK | Pubs in new 24-hour opening era

Does anyone at all want this, or think it’s a good idea? Once again the Government has forced through a measure that all the experts, the medical profession, the police, and most of the public, disagree with. Who is pulling their strings? Anyone would think it was the Alcohol Mega-Industry that governed the country.

My grandparents signed the Pledge of the Band of Hope, when they were youngsters. Looks like we might have to revive the Temperance Movement. Gulp. And it’s a Labour Government, with all those proud Methodist and nonconformist roots, that has brought us to this.

/spadassin/: Webmasters who didn’t think when they registered their URL

We’ve just got in from eating out at the Dancing Dragon in Summertown, the first time for some months we’ve had an evening meal out together, rather than lunch on a Saturday. The Dancing Dragon is fun: it’s one of those Eat As Much As You Can - sorry, Like * - places, and it usually has a lot of Chinese people eating there, which I always take to be a good sign.

Made me reminisce about some of the Chinese restaurants I have known over the years. I don’t think I tasted Chinese food until I was 17. My Mum was a meat-and-two-veg kind of cook, and back in the 1950s that was what we ate, whether or not the meat would actually have satisfied the present trade descriptions legislation. I certainly remember some 1950s lamb chops that had less meat on them than you could get stuck between your front teeth.

The first time I went to a Chinese restaurant was on a school trip. One of the General Studies modules in the 6th Form was Chinese, and that term the teacher arranged an outing to a restaurant in Wardour Street. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I don’t think I could ever afford the full-price evening menu, but we sometimes went out for the 5/- (five shilling = 25 pence) lunch menu. Then when Alison and I were courting (I think it’s fair to describe what we did with that quaint and antiquated term) the place I took her for our first date was a Chinese restaurant: the Oakwood Palace. I don’t remember what we ate, but we both remember having a mathematical conversation - which is rich, considering Alison went on to become a mathematician, and I hardly have a mathematical bone in my body - about negative numbers, in which I described thinking about them in terms of “negative apples”, which appear to be fruit made of anti-matter.

After we were married, and Alison was working at Barnet General, a Chinese colleague of hers called Benny organised a work outing to a “proper Chinese restaurant” in China Town, an enormous barn of a place where the meal consisted of about 16 courses served one after the other. The one I particularly remember, which I think none of us non-Chinese ate, was a very rare chicken, still with its head and beak attached, which looked pink enough that you suspected it had only been shown the outside of the oven from a distance of a hundred feet. Not nice. And I’m sure Edwina Currie wouldn’t have liked it one bit.

I really don’t remember eating Chinese food in Durham, St Albans or Bedford - or even Swindon, very much, though it may just be we weren’t eating out a lot in those days. So we’ve really only started again, since being in Oxford. Probably the nicest place is the Xi’an in Summertown, though it’s a lot more expensive than the Dancing Dragon (and doesn’t have as many Chinese customers, either.)

So, how about you: What are your first memories of eating Chinese?

* Note to self: This is not a challenge!

So many people have asked to see or read the novel when it’s finished - well, one or two, anyway - that I am now willing to publish it on the Web.

It’s “finished” in the sense that there are over 50,000 words, the story is all there, and it comes to an ending. And I’m not wanting to write any more, at the moment. But any NaNoWriMo work is notoriously a first draft, rude and unpolished, so I am proposing to publish this as version 1.0 at present. If anyone has any comments, suggestions, corrections, I will be happy to ignore / consider / use them / do whatever else I feel like. And if I get around to substantially revising the thing, I may release it as version 1.01, 1.02, or even 2.0, and so ad infinitum.

It’s out there somewhere as a plain text file (259K), or if you prefer something prettier (highly recommended), in PDF (289K), for which you will of course need Adobe Acrobat Reader.

No time to blog any more this evening - thanks to a day off I’ve passed the fifty thousand word mark (actually, 50,170) and it’s just about finished, except for trying to draw it to a conclusion. That’s turning out to be quite difficult, even though we all know what happens at the end of the story.

It’s the little things that suddenly bring a lump to your throat.

Like editing the Contacts on your mobile phone, so that instead of Mum and Dad, it reads just Mum.

So cold.

Must hibernate until end of February.

Can’t hibernate till I’ve finished NaNoWriMo. Only about 6,700 words to go.

My favourite non-Microsoft office suite, and why to use it:
OpenOffice.org Tips, Tricks, and Ideas: Top Ten Reasons to Start a Healthy New Relationship With OpenOffice.org

Tall buildings.

Entish

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

I celebrate passing the 40,000 word mark (forty thousand words!) by reading Kathryn’s blog and discovering this quiz, only to find I am an ent, when I had felt sure I would be an elf!

Ah! the gold and the red and the sighing of the leaves in the Autumn in Taur-na-Neldor!
It was more than my desire.

Not sure about that …

Can people whose way of fighting their case is so shabby, vile, sickening, and downright unchristian, possibly be right?

Times Online: Bishops want signatures taken off anti-gay letter

I think not. Three cheers for the bishops who are dissociating themselves from this witch-hunt. If only there were more of them.

Today’s chapter more or less wrote itself, thanks to the unique voice of Doeg the Edomite, Saul’s chief herdsman, fixer-upper and doer of dirty jobs, priest-killer. (1 Samuel 21 and 22) A cross between the Mitchell Brothers from Eastenders, and Titus Pullo from Rome. Altogether a nasty piece of work, but a delight to get into the head of and write.

There’s much too much alter ego, or wishful thinking, coming into all this, I reckon. The novelist as Jekyll and Hyde?

Current word-count: 34205