Storyteller’s World

That’s certainly the effect it seems to have on the average Brit driver, at any rate.

Right now the village has been thrown into chaos by the blight of roadworks, in the process of imposing traffic calming (sic). (Vide my rant in the parish mag.) But hey, why should we be different from the rest of Oxford? We have to do our bit, too, to achieve the permanent total gridlock the Council’s highway planners are aiming for, as their contribution to the fight against global warming.

So we’ve now got to the bit where they actually build chicanes, and for the next three weeks the village will be closed to through traffic. So at various points along the lane, there are signs: ROAD AHEAD CLOSED. It’s incredible the number of people who don’t believe them - presumably because they don’t also say NO, REALLY. THIS MEANS YOU, MR / MRS (INSERT YOUR NAME HERE). They drive another half mile, discover the road really is completely blocked, and then of course have to turn round in someone’s driveway and belt back through the village at a furious 50 mph, mowing down children, grannies, squirrels and cyclists as they go.

But then, why should they change the habits of a lifetime? The road through the village has always been signposted ACCESS ONLY. Since the roadworks began, this has been supplemented by barriers halfway across the road, saying ACCESS ONLY in bigger letters. Li tells me she’s had the following conversation with various colleagues.

- Does that mean we really can’t drive through your parents’ village any more?

Li: You never could. It’s always been access only.

- No, but does it mean we really can’t, now?

Well, was anyone else who celebrated St Simon and St Jude today, as disturbed as I was by the OT reading set for Evening Prayer? For those who elected to read the passage from the First Book of Maccabees, we were regaled with this account, from a book the C of E considers suitable to be read in public worship, of some species of Israelite Taleban of the 2nd century BC:

Then there united with them a company of Hasideans, mighty warriors of Israel, all who offered themselves willingly for the law. And all who became fugitives to escape their troubles joined them and reinforced them. They organized an army, and struck down sinners in their anger and renegades in their wrath; the survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety. And Mattathias and his friends went around and tore down the [heathen] altars; they forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys that they found within the borders of Israel. They hunted down the arrogant, and the work prospered in their hands. They rescued the law out of the hands of the Gentiles and kings, and they never let the sinner gain the upper hand.

So what are we to make of these guys? Zealous contenders for the true faith once delivered to Israel? Pederastic voyeurs? (”Show us your dick - it’s OK, we’re priests!”) Or religious terrorists? Where does the righteous reformer shade into the evil fanatic?

If this stuff gives a vicar the heebie-jeebies, God knows what it would do to a sensitive soul.

Or sermon…

Lots of other people have blogged or del.icio.used this. Because it’s good advice.

Creating Passionate Users: Better Beginnings: how to start a presentation, book, article…

There may not be many Jos or Antonias Over There, but it looks like my moniker is quite a bit more common.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 288 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Another Tuesday has gone by without the announcement. (Apparently they are always made on a Tuesday at 11 a.m.)

So what the whole of Oxford Diocese is wanting to ask Tony Blair is, not when is he going to step down and hand over to Gordon or A.N.Other, but: Who’s going to be our new Bishop? Come on, Prime Minister: what can you possibly have to think about, that’s more important than this?

Went to see The History Boys.

Pure fantasy, of course. When were teachers at grammar school ever such glorious, inspirational, technicolour characters? Maybe they were, but you had to stay on into the Third Year Sixth for them to throw off the dull masks, and reveal their true colours. That’s what I did wrong then, getting my place at Oxford in the second year of the Sixth Form, without that special high octane scholarship tuition, and in spite of Miss Edwards’ attempts to deter me, and get me to stay on after A-levels like my friend John, who then got an Exhibition. But back then I was a young man in a hurry; and in any case, doing a 4 year course I would have been nearly 23 when I graduated. Still, the extra year might have helped me grow up a bit. Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea even now.

But no, the real fantasy element of the film was the improbable, nay impossible, Fiona.

No grammar school other than Fantasy County Boys’ ever employed a secretary as young and gorgeous as Fiona. They were only ever sober middle-aged matrons who would hold little attraction for the headmaster, still less the sixth form boys.

Not that we didn’t have a Fiona at my school. She was a gorgeous creature too, in the year below me, and immortalised in my imagination, as a character in one of the epic poems I never wrote, as Fifi L’Amour. Beautiful, immortal, unattainable, for she was going out with the Apollo of the Lower Sixth, Max (good name!)

What would be really interesting would be to see some North London version of Alan Bennett write his take on where Max and Fifi are now…

You can read a more sensible account of watching The History Boys in Oxford over at Milan’s blog.

The Education Guardian has an opinion piece by Boris Johnson on cheating in exams.

I sometimes think the man isn’t quite the amiable bumbling idiot he always pretends to be.

So here was my contribution to One Day In History:

My day off begins in our flat in Church Stretton.

When you’re a vicar, you have to live in the house that goes with the job. Free housing is considered one of the perks of the job, justifying the low salary compared with other professionals. But it does mean that you haven’t got a foot on the property ladder, and when you retire or stop being a vicar, you’ve nowhere to live.

So three years ago, when the boom in property prices was going pretty alarmingly, Alison and I bought a small flat in Church Stretton. An investment for our retirement, a holiday home meanwhile, and general bolt hole. And the item of the budget that swallows up most of Alison’s salary in the mean time. Of course we’d love to stay on in Oxford, which is my favourite city of all, but there’s no way we would be able to afford a house there. And Shropshire is a beautiful, unspoilt place to live.

I try and get to the flat about once a month for a quiet day of reading and prayer, away from the telephone, and for some exercise walking on the Long Mynd. I drove up on Sunday after evening service, spent yesterday there, and drove back this morning which is my day off.

Breakfast: spiced fruit muffins, with orange juice, an apple and coffee.

It was a grey, cheerless day, and the drive takes about 2 and a half hours by A49 and A44. The motorway is quicker but not so pleasant. I get annoyed, as usual, by lorry drivers who drive at 45 or 50 mph whether they’re in the country or in a 30 mph limit. And by people who live in places like Pershore, where it appears a yellow line by the roadside means “Park here.” I like to listen to music when I’m driving, and today I’ve got some CDs of Vonda Shepherd, and Kate Rusby, a folk singer whose voice I’ve just discovered.

Stop at Sainsbury’s in Kidlington to buy a sandwich for lunch (chicken and chorizo: a new flavour for them) and a ready meal for this evening (Thai red chicken curry). This is because I’ll be eating alone: Alison is going straight from work as a university lecturer to her Ministry Training Course. After 26 years as a vicar’s wife, she is preparing to be ordained herself, as a non-stipendiary minister.

This is just another of several surprises in our life in recent years, though the others have been more “expectable” surprises: our four children growing up, leaving home, and three of them now married. The vicarage which a few years ago seemed to be barely big enough for six of us, and full of bodies and noise, is now very quiet.

I sit here reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I’ve never read before. For a year or two I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the (many) classics of literature I’ve missed out on. To my surprise, I’m enjoying many of them much more than I expected. It’s not so surprising, after all, that they were popular enough in their day to survive and become thought of as classics. Literature, art and music are a major part of what we receive from the past.

As a vicar I feel I am playing a part in one of the most important institutions of living history: the Church of England. But it is not only a body that exists to preserve good things from the past. It also has its place in the 21st century, to help people to understand and enter into their inheritance of faith in God, to use it sensibly, and hand it on to those who come after us.

Now that the patter of tiny feet is long gone - and even the thunder of huge teenage trainers (white or otherwise), it seems to me someone ought to publish a book of helpful hints and advice for people who are living through what we are. Here’s a first contribution:

You will probably find yourself doing the laundry less frequently: maybe only every two weeks, instead of several times a week. It may become necessary to buy extra clothes, especially if you are the kind of person (man) who hates buying clothes and has always made do with the minimum number of (clerical) shirts required by a weekly wash-cycle.

The alternative would be to carry on doing the laundry once a week, and run a half-load. I wonder which course is more environmentally responsible?

“I was given your name by [the daughter of the deceased]. I’m coming to the funeral, but I don’t know where it is. Can you call me back and tell me the postcode of the church, so I can key it in to the GPS?”

I felt a bit grumpy about meeting this request, for reasons not entirely connected with envy. Some of them also relate to questions like:

Why not waste the Vicar’s time to get directions to the church, rather than follow the family’s directions or description, or find some other workaround?

What’s wrong with using a map, dammit?

Why not Google it, where you can get a map, the postcode (if you’re really dependent on the GPS), and a wonderful parish website?

But I phoned her back to tell her the postcode, and said, “You’re welcome.”

Hypocrite prêtre, - mon semblable, - mon frère!

For all the bloggers out there who are planning to take part in this year’s NaNoWriMo, I offer these words of encouragement from Annie Dillard’s Writing Life.

To comfort friends discouraged by their writing pace, you could offer them this:

It takes years to write a book - between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out such books?

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labour. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

So that’s my justification for not doing it this year.

Yes, that would definitely be the group noun.

The day after Li’s wedding, we were showing My Mum some of the official photos of Sun’s wedding, which Rufus has posted on his website. As we explained who the different people, relatives, parents were, My Mum started asking, “Was he/she there yesterday?” And the answer was sometimes No, that’s Rufus’ family, and sometimes, Yes.

For you see, Rufus and Alex were housemates (along with Rupert, AKA Big Ging) and indeed had all been in the same year at school as Sun, though not in the same set. When Sun was looking for a place to live in London, she met up with some friends at the Anchor (watering hole of choice) who told her about a vacancy at the House. So Sun went to share as the fourth with The Boys … and the rest is history: two of them have ended up as sons-in-law. And quite a lot of the same friends were naturally at both weddings.

Then there are all the other facts like both of the new in-laws’ mothers having similar-looking sisters, so that I’m struggling to get to know the family names and relationships of groups of people that make The Archers or Neighbours look straightforward… and you see my problem.

Yesterday there were 17 of us for a day-after-the-wedding lunch. Alison and myself (Alison having lost her voice for the whole weekend), the Welsh contingent, Sister Dr Jan from TX and My Mum, plus our four children and their other halves. Naturally I expected this to be an occasion when all would sit at the feet of Paterfamilias, listening attentively to his stories, reminiscences and words of wisdom, and responding politely and succinctly when called upon to do so. Instead, it was a bedlam of the exchanges of the 20-somethings, in which the topic of conversation changed direction so rapidly, like a shuttle shooting backwards and forwards through the loom, or a silver fish darting among the coral, that by the time I grasped what they were talking about, they had moved on twice more. All I could do was bask in a kind of warm nostalgic glow of reflecting that, in purely biological terms at least, all this probably counts as Success.

Here are some of Tom and Annie’s pictures of the wedding.

The morning of Li’s wedding… So what could be more natural than to decide to upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS X? It’s just the kind of thing that can be quietly going on in the background while I’m writing up the marriage registers, polishing up the father of the bride’s speech, writing my crib sheet so I don’t forget the couple’s names. (Embarrassing at the best of times, but even more so when it’s your own daughter and son-in-law.)

Then the following morning I discover the upgrade to 10.4.8 has broken the printer.

A quick web search reveals that thousands of people have had the same experience. But most of them have not been slightly hung-over (though not as much as after Sun’s wedding), worn out and already quite fractious anyway. The first solution on one of the sites involves using Fixamac’s Printer Setup Repair (only $25). I am constitutionally averse to spending money to fix something Mac has broke.

Fortunately a much simpler option turns out to be going to Disc Utility and repairing disc permissions. Some people say you should do this every time you upgrade, though I don’t remember ever having to do it before. I also went to the HP website and found they had a new version of the driver for this device, as a Universal Binary that would work better with Intel Mac.

Between these two solutions, the printer is working again. Better than it was before. Or is that just my imagination?

… white trainers.

CrunklyGill’s pictures of Li and Alex’s wedding.

Gervase enthuses about the advantages of keyboard shortcuts in his article in Times Online.

I’m a great fan too: they are probably the tricks that have most enhanced and simplified the way I use the computer. Wouldn’t be without them. One of the greatest thrills in daily life is discovering a new one I hadn’t come across before.

Following the precedent set before Sun’s wedding, here’s a long ago picture of this week’s bride to be:

I cringe when I hear men call their daughters “princess”, no doubt for some totally irrational reason which I don’t particularly care to examine. So it’s strange that we now receive letters delivered here addressed to Princess Li. They are from Waitrose (which in our case we have not got). On some occasion Li registered with them online, where there was an extensive drop-down menu of titles ranging from the usual Mr Mrs Miss Ms through every imaginable option concluding with Princess. I’m not sure how many real princesses (if there is such a thing) register online with Waitrose, but on that particularly day Li struck her blow for social equality by registering as a surreal Princess. And so she remains to this day.

1966 was one of those adolescent years for which I kept a tediously detailed diary; partly because I had self-defined the year as a turning point in my life, following the four weeks I spent in Germany at a summer language school.

That’s how I know that on October 4, 1966, I spent most of the day stewarding for a teachers’ in service training day, which gave the students two days off, then spent the evening reading Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts by Eichendorff, and pining for the girl I (hoped I) was going out with, whom I’d met in Germany and who lived on the opposite side of London.

This evening I spent in the front passenger seat of a police car, driving round the city looking for an elderly parishioner who had gone missing. Parishioner was finally found (not by us) safe and sound, walking along the Northern Bypass.

If you’d told 1966 Me what he’d be doing 40 years later - would he have believed you?