Category: Blog Entry

Average sort of day today!  Train to Edinburgh for the College of Bishops where we addressed an agenda which probably required two or three days.  Train back to Leuchars for the Institution of David Wilson at St Andrews, St Andrews – a great day for the congregation.  All sorts of excitements lie in wait.

Just like old times in Northern Ireland, one listens to the news to find out .. in this case about the impending strike at Grangemouth oil refinery and the threat that supplies of fuel will be affected for a month.  I find myself pretty cynical about it all.  Can’t see that the strike will achieve much – other than the loss of public sympathy.  Management sound as if they are hyping the effects of it to put pressure on the workers.  And what is the point of government saying, ‘Don’t panic buy’?  If you live in a rural area, you have to move around and the car is all you have.  So now we are in the situation where there is little fuel in the filling stations because it is all in the tanks of cars.

Father Carli may have attended one clergy meeting too many.  But getting out of it by strapping himself to 1000 helium  balloons may have been taking it too far – and cost him his life.

I’m amazed to see that the Scout movement has seen its biggest rise in membership in 20 years.  Even when I was Youth Officer for the Church of Ireland [just think of that!] 25 years ago, it looked as if uniformed youth work was in trouble. Yes indeed – why would people join very traditional organisations with a liking for funny clothes?  Yet with some careful and imaginative development work, a revival is under way – 15000 extra members joined last year.

I’m surprised.  I would have thought it was hopeless – not least because of the difficulty of recruiting volunteer leadership.  So the reversal of decline gives me hope  ..

I watch very little TV.  Which makes the bits that I do see all the more astonishing.  I was climbing out of the garb at the end of a longish day and saw ten minutes of ‘I’d do anything’ in which some apparently sensible and considerably [vocally] talented girls sang for Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber who appeared to be sitting in Las Vegas in a pair of pink pyjamas.  And instead of picking a winner, they seem to be going through an interminable process of humiliating them one at a time, week by week.  Agonising, exploitative, degrading .. just some of the adjectives that come to mind.

Added to my collection of Perthshire sayings today at a splendid congregational lunch:

‘Do have some pheasant.  It’s on the Aaaga.’

You may have noticed that my blog on Holloway Pills stirred some comment – particularly from Noel Heather, recently retired from Royal Holloway.  He says that its founder, Thomas Holloway, was the originator of the Holloway Pills and that the College was therefore built on the proceeds of placebo medicines.

I pondered this as I heaved my various bits of episcopal bling through the security scanner at Edinburgh Airport yesterday.  This stirred some questions from the person behind me in the queue about what had happened to +Richard Holloway.  ‘I read his books and they made me think seriously about Christianity’   Not so placebo after all, methinks.

Bit of a milestone being back in Portadown today for Gemma and Al’s wedding and I was glad to be able to do it.  Gemma lived with our Anna in Belfast for four years so it was sort of family.  Interesting to be back in Seagoe for the first time and to be at home but not at the same time!

Naturally I took time to get various bits of personal maintenance done at the same time.  Another trip to McMahon’s shop to buy a suit – some more ‘easing’ of the trousers was called for.  Got my watch fixed at Campbell the Jeweller behind St Mark’s Church after it stopped as I stepped off the plane in Bangkok.  Had a haircut at Encanto – short on the cutting but long on chat – with my favourite hairdresser Michael who comes from Dundee.  Also answered various detailed questions from local blog readers … including ‘What is the current mileage of the Faithful Passat’  To which the answer is – it will pass 160000 on the way home from the airport.  The oil pressure warning light did come on on Thursday but, since I carry a spare everything in the back, that was easily dealt with.

Blogstead at its best.  I went for a quick cycle yesterday at the end of the afternoon.  Lifting my eyes from the road, I found four deer keeping me company just over the hedge.  They then jumped the fence, crossed the road in front of me and headed off across the fields.  Tonight I drove home from Newport – through the Sidlaw Hills from Dundee – at around 9.30 pm.  Amazing how much light there was in the sky behind the hills.

I’ve been debating with myself the ‘clean desks’ policy for the renovated Diocesan Office. At the moment it has computers but no desks and chairs. That really suits me. I used to believe that you could make phone calls faster standing up – maybe the same could apply to meetings? Tho’ to be honest, I’m having one of those phases when I can’t quite get on top of the administration. The residual clutter in my e mail Inbox won’t reduce below about 60. And ditto on my desk is obstinately present. It’s not a backlog. More a layer of stuff which doesn’t quite seem to know where it is going to – and it doesn’t go away. I suppose I should chuck it out and start clear. Nobody seems to be looking for it so it will not be missed.

Times are a-changing for our little community out here at Blogstead Episcopi.  Our good friends and neighbours at No 1 are moving.  So they are looking for a buyer with loads of liquid readies.  We are looking for new community members.  Like the SEC, we are into inclusiveness.  At 50%, we are seriously overweight in bishops.  So no more of them, please.   But some diversity in  gender, sexuality, race …  would shorten the winter for us all.  As with The Sound of Music and ‘I can do Anything’, we thought of auditions or the opportunity to make a short Powerpoint presentation on ‘What I could bring to Blogstead’ or ‘All I know about Continuous Aeration Plant septic tanks’

Tenth anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement yesterday.  I have ended up with conflicting views of it.  Through the last ten years of grinding movement towards peace, it survived all challenges and remained the ‘only show in town.’  People who might otherwise have died are alive today because of it.  But it was deeply flawed.  It strengthened the extremes at the expense of the centre – when one might have expected it to marginalise the extremes.  Gary McKeone, writing in today’s Independent, has a sharp piece: ‘The lesson of the peace process: terror works.’  His thesis is that the Agreement empowered those political parties which brought to the table the implicit threat of violence.

I have long understood that political agreements tend to be made by politicians of the right rather than by liberals.  That’s partly because those politicians make it impossible for more liberal politicians to do the deals because they are always being attacked from the right.  So now we have what are known in Northern Ireland as the ‘chuckle brothers’ – Paisley and McGuinness – apparently content to work together.  The irony is that the strongest conviction politicians on each side are the ones who seem prepared to make and operate an agreement based almost entirely on pragmatism.  A very strange world.