iBond?
News out on Gizmodo today is that in the next Bond film, Quantum of Solace, 007 will be using a Sony Ericsson C902. What? Not an iPhone 3G?
Not a chance. Can you really see Daniel Craig turning his attentions away from some stylish, attractive and, no doubt, curvatious accomplice to fiddle around surfing the net or reading his gmail on an iPhone?
I don’t think so.
James Bond uses a phone to call people. And, if the leaks are to be believed, to kill them. But I just can’t seem him squinting at it to look at Facebook. Can you?
Posted on Wednesday, 6 August 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | No comments
The big wheel
The wheel of change has turned…
Next year, Caroline, my youngest, leaves school for university, following the route of departure taken by her brother Jonathan this September. So after twenty years with children in the house, Sharon and I will be living on our own - at least for university terms. We had earmarked this point in our life as a possible time for me to consider a job-change, as it would create the least disruption for other members of the family.
Well, that time has come. A few weeks ago, I was appointed to be “Dean of non-residential training” at St Michael’s College in Llandaff (Cardiff), with effect from the new year. For me this marks a move back into teaching, but with a number of important differences from the post I held at Trinity College nine years ago. I will be responsible for the theological education of people who need the flexibility of non-residential theological study. In addition, I will be teaching theology in the School of Theological Studies and Religion at Cardiff University and working with the Church in Wales and the Methodist Church to develop this form of training and the ministry it serves. St Michael’s is the main theological college serving the Church in Wales (Anglican), but it has developed and diversified over recent years to deliver an exciting and flexible set of theological courses. It’s a great team to be joining and the prospect makes me very excited.
However, this kind of change will also mean saying farewells, to the two parish churches I serve and to Foundation which I helped found a few years ago. This has been the part that brings sadness alongside the joy of a new set of horizons. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that churches should be decoupled from the personalities of their leaders, so my move, though it will bring all three communities some challenges, will also bring needed change and growth. Foundation, being a newish community, feels the challenge particularly, but it is also in a good place, with an effective and healthy constitution to weather this major period of adjustment. St Paul’s and Cotham, being more (usual?) parishes (actually, I don’t think “usual” is really the right word - as they’re highly unusual in most ways - but how else can I put it?) are more affected by my change from a structural point of view as they are used to having me work with them on a full-time basis. But again, I think changes like this bring opportunities and exciting times ahead.
At a personal level, it will also mean that the one other person who would be affected were I to take a job-change - Sharon - is able to continue in her present job, as we can commute from a new home in Monmouthshire to our respective places of work. So whilst we will move house, she won’t move job - which is good. So the next twelve months bring big change.
Posted on Wednesday, 6 August 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | 1 comment
Getting up to date
Sadly, this poor blog has been taking a back seat for the last few months. The principal reason for this is that 4th August was “zero hour”, by which I had to clear my desk/life of anything I would need to do in work and in Bristol before leaving for nearly three months spent in California. I’m glad to say that’s now done, and my desk is genuinely clear. I’m now over 4000 miles away from my desk and I must say, it feels good.
The past two months have also been one of those times of change, where the priority of blogging has been eclipsed by other matters of long-term importance. Just in case there is anyone left reading this blog, I’ll discuss those changes in the post that follows. However, to anyone still reading this - thanks for your patience, and I hope to liven things up a bit now …
Posted on Wednesday, 6 August 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | No comments
Another one of the Devil’s schemes rumbled on Youtube
Hooray for YouTube. One of the brethren has finally rumbled the *real* reason for the Hadron Collider being built at CERN in Switzerland. I’ve been warning one of my churchwardens, Helen, who’s somehow been caught up in this evil scheme (something to do with being a physicist) that she and her colleagues are going to make the whole of Switzerland into a black hole as soon as they switch the darned thing on. (What an inconvenience: we’ll need to drive all the way around through France for holidays in Italy!) Anyway, below is a final expose that it’s really a scheme of the Devil.
Go watch …
Posted on Tuesday, 1 July 2008 by Paul | Posted in humour | 2 comments
Counterintuitive desert wisdom
We have put aside the easy burden, which is self-accusation, and weighed ourselves down with the heavy one, self-justification.
(John the Dwalf)
Self-justification is a heavy burden, because there is no end to carrying it; there will always be some new situation where we need to establish our position, dig the trench for the ego to defend. But how on earth can we say that self-accusation is a light burden? We have to remember the fundamental principle of letting go of fear. Self-accusation, honesty about our failings, is a light burden because whatever we have to face in ourselves, however painful is the recognition, however hard it is to feel at times that we have to start all over again, we know that the burden is already known and accepted by God’s mercy…
There is a saying ascribed to Isidore the Priest warning that ‘of all evil suggestions, the most terrible is the prompting to follow your own heart.’ Once again, the modern reader will be taken aback. ‘Follow what your heart says’ is part of the standard popular wisdom of our day, like ‘following the dream’; are we being told to suspect our deepest emotions and longings, when surely we have learned that we have to listen to what’s deepest in us and accept and nurture our real feelings? But the desert monastics would reply that, left to ourselves, the search for what the heart prompts is like peeling an onion; we are not going to arrive at a pure and simple set of inclinations. In the matter of self-examination, as in others, ‘the truth is rarely pure and never simple’. The desert means a stepping back from the great system of collusive fantasy in which I try to decide who I am, sometimes to pursuade you to tell me who I am (in accord of course with my own preferences), sometimes to use God as a reinforcement for my picture of myself and so on and on. The ‘burden’ of self-accusation, the suspicion of what the heart prompts, this is not about an inhuman austerity or self-hatred but about the need for us all to be coaxed into honesty by the confidence that God can forgive and heal.
Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes Lion, 2003. pp.47-49
Posted on Monday, 30 June 2008 by Paul | Posted in spirituality | No comments
Bristol-Bath Cyclepath: relief and hope, or false dawn?
The BBC is reporting a change of heart by the councillor who was pushing the idea of converting the wonderful, first-of-its-kind Bristol-to-Bath Cyclepath to dual-use as a bus lane. You can get the story here. If they’re right, the idea is dead in the water, with a face-saving climb-down for Councillor Mark Bradshaw after seeing a similar bus scheme in Cambridge (and also implying that he’d never actually looked at the width of the required route - yes, right…)
However, last time the BBC reported on this story, they gave the false impression that the council had done an about-face, when in fact it hadn’t. So I’m not opening the champagne until I hear confirmation from Sustrans and CTC. But here’s hoping that, this time, the Beeb have got the facts right.
Posted on Monday, 2 June 2008 by Paul | Posted in bicycles, ecology, rotten boroughs | 1 comment
Mary Sill: 24th November 1911 - 13th May 2008
Mary was one of the bright lights of the congregation at Cotham. Before the war, she had worked in haematology, seeing active service in the blood transfusion service working all over Europe with the Red Cross. In the mid-1960s she was admitted to the Order of Deaconesses. At that time, women in the Church of England could not be “ordained”, which meant that they could serve neither as priests nor even as deacons. Mary was committed to serving God and the Church, so she, like many women of that time, chose the Order of Deaconesses as the best path available to follow their vocation.
She served as a parish worker in Laurence Weston, an area on the northern outskirts of Bristol, and then eventually served within the chaplaincy team at Southmead Hospital. She left full-time stipendiary ministry to care for her aging mother, who, like Mary, lived well into her 90s.
Mary was a great pray-er, but also very interested in theology. When I arrived at Cotham, she was already approaching her 90th birthday. I remember my first visit, when she was anticipating another hip replacement operation. She was absolutely matter-of-fact about the risks and wanted to speak about her funeral should she not recover from the surgery. Fortunately for us all, she did, so it was the first a many visits. All the staff of the parish used to say that visiting Mary was self-indulgence! She always gave us such a welcome, shining a wonderful high-wattage smile of welcome that seemed to warm up whoever was the recipient. Visits would include a conversation about some theological subject or other, but most of all, I always left feeling far more ‘ministered-to’ than ‘ministering’. (This, I guess, should always be the case, but I’m still not quite that adept as a Christian minister for it to always feel like that!)
As she was preparing to come to the Midnight Mass on Christmas 2006 she had a bad fall, breaking her leg. There followed five hard months in hospital, battling an infection as well as healing the bone and learning to get about again. It all gets much harder as we get older. Her patience was astonishing. She was still in plaster, even when she returned home. Her last time at Cotham was on Sunday 20th April. The following day, she had a stroke and was taken into hospital. The stroke was not severe, but it did affect her speech. Then after being transferred back to the rehabilitation hospital where she had spent most of those five months, she fell ill and died peacefully in the night.
Mary’s spirituality was centred on the Eucharist, so it seemed most appropriate to have communion at the funeral. As it was her, we pulled out the stops and had incense too. There’s something very wonderful about incensing the coffin of someone who has followed Christ all their lives. It’s an honouring of the body which has been a hallowed temple of the Holy Spirit during their life. So we duly censed Mary’s coffin and sang the Nunc Dimittis at the end of the service.
There’s a tradition that a priest’s coffin is always brought into church in reverse to the usual way. Most coffins are brought in feet-first, ‘facing’ the front of the church. A priest’s coffin is brought in head-first, so that they ‘face’ the people whom they have served during their life. When Jennifer, my colleague, got to know Mary, she told her that in many ways, had she been younger, she would have loved to have been ordained a priest. (Most deaconesses were eventually ordained deacon and then, some years later, priest - but Mary was retired before this was permitted and she didn’t feel it was appropriate to be ordained deacon or priest in her retirement). Just as the funeral directors were about to bring the coffin into the church, it just came as an insight, that - for Mary - this orientation of coffin was appropriate. For she had served and ministered to all of us, and generations before us, by who she was and by her love for the God whom she served. I wonder if anyone noticed the direction of the coffin. I will miss her welcoming smile …
Posted on Wednesday, 28 May 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | 3 comments
Cornwall at last! Nearly six weeks gone and no blogging…
Yes, well, I’ve had other things to do, OK?
At the moment, I’m doing another Whitsunday holiday in Porthtowan and have internet access via the Blue Bar’s wireless. This must be one of my favourite places in the world. Porthtowan is located nearly at the end of Cornwall, as the ‘leg’ of the UK sticks into the Atlantic Ocean. The beach faces north by north-west and the sunsets from the Blue Bar are spectacular at this time of the year. It’s a good surfing beach, witnessed by the number of VW campers which are parked at the end of the road where it joins the beach. At the same spot is located the aforementioned Blue Bar, serving real ale, excellent food and (if you’re lucky) live music.
The weather has been mixed: like most of the south of England, we had atrocious weather on Bank Holiday Monday, but today has been fine. The surf is variable, but never calm enough to make it not worth getting in the water.
Highlights over the past six weeks, which, if time and inclination permit, I will blog: meeting up with Paul, Rachelle, Eden and Cate for the first time in two years during their visit to the UK; reading “A mind at peace” by Mary Margaret Funk - seldom do I read such a life-altering book; conducting the funeral of Deaconess Mary Sill and getting all accommodation booked for my 3 months in America, which begins at the start of August.
Posted on Tuesday, 27 May 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | 2 comments
The Postmodern: boring the people of Britain since 1999
Do you remember the 1990s? The decade of creative fun in the midst of a sense of Fin de Siecle which gave everything the sense that the clock was on double-speed. It was a decade which became a cultural helter-skelter, where everything was up for ironization. Philosophies of knowledge which traded on their shock-value (ooh! Nietzsche!) and struck a heady alliance between the academy and the media (at least when it came to the Humanities). Routledge seemed to be producing five volumes on postmodernism this, postmodern that,most of which were appallingly-written and made very little sense to anyone, including - I suspect - the sub-editors and even the authors themselves. Then there were the glorious incidents of unmasking this as the intellectual equivalent of the Kings New Clothes, such as the online Postmodern-essay generator, which would randomly produce a huge nonsensical essay which read exactly like one of the aforementioned Routledge books. There was also the famous article on “Postmodern Physics” by Alan Sokal, a physicist who deliberately wrote a nonsensical paper which was duly published by the cultural studies journal Social Text.
For me, what killed Postmodernism as a movement was the morning people turned on their TV sets in September 2001 and discovered what happens when some people, who believe in a life-denying ideology with sufficient seriousness, decide to launch an all-out attack on Western values, symbols, and above all, people. Suddenly, irony seemed curiously superfluous. It was time to rediscover what we had which was of real value. Although some writers sought to incorporate Islamist terror under the wider head of the Postmodern, I just think it stretched the category too far from the original to be at all credible. If we have an intellectual era now, it’s a mixture of social thinking competing for our attention, all of which has its roots in the Enlightenment - politically, things don’t seem very Post to me.
So it is sad that at a cultural level, there is still so much trash around. Too many kids in arts colleges are evidently being educated with an outdated cultural theory from old lecture notes, probably passed on to the present teachers by previous colleagues who left the institution years ago. We don’t need trash now. We need something new, giving meaning, purpose, joy.
So it was gratifying to see one of the best satirists of them all, Clive James, get his teeth into the new coinage from the Royal Mint. The designer of these ridiculous new coins (aged 26, therefore only Post by derivation…) stated that the designs were “to intrigue, to entertain, and raise a smile”. This would be fine if they were chocolate money. But these are coins of the realm. Please, why don’t they say, in numbers, how much they’re worth? And when will these faux-Derrideans please realize that Britain is tired, tired, tired of stale postmodernism?
Posted on Sunday, 13 April 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | 8 comments
Dim the lights baby …
Here’s another computer nostalgia post coming up…
Those of us who grew up either using old VDUs or early CP/M or MSDOS computers may sometimes long for the simplicity of a black-on-white white-on-black screen when we’re writing. I must say that I find it:
- More soothing on the eyes
- Less distracting than a fully-lit screen
- More conducive to creative thinking, and hence writing
There are a growing number of applications out there which attempt to simulate this old, soothing environment on contemporary computers. Lifehacker alerted the world to another one today …
However, for Mac users, especially new ones (such as Rick or Richard), there’s a much easier way to achieve this state of half-remembered innocence and simplicity.
The trick is to press Ctrl+Option+Cmd+8 and dim the lights baby. (Doing it again restores things to normal.)
Posted on Thursday, 10 April 2008 by Paul | Posted in geekism, macolatry | 1 comment
