Hope to emerge blinking into the light after General Synod later today. It seems more at ease with itself these days. When I stand back and look at it, there is an astonishing level of competence on view from those who slog away at the developmental and management life of the church. Indeed one ponders whether the competence is in inverse proportion to the size of the church. There was a very good dinner last light – full of episcopalian bloggers too busy pondering how they might chronicle the event to be able to enjoy it themselves. Ivor Guild made a wonderful and nostalgic speech about some of the great figures of the past. Pity there are no characters like that around nowadays. But then again ….
Category: Blog Entry
Mystery
My mother set out for Portadown today to leave her two cats – Mac the Siamese and Sue the British Blue – at Elaine’s cattery while she goes to my nephew Connor’s confirmation in Cambridge on Sunday. So how did she end up serving a customer in an organic fruit and vegetable shop in Moyallan?
Well – one thing does tend to lead to another.
Exam Weather
General Synod sort of looms up on the horizon at this time of year – with the same feeling of being locked up or locked away as I used to feel with summer exams. I always find the inactivity difficult – clergy are, I think, used to moving from place to place as a way of keeping ahead of trouble.
Meanwhile the IT angst continues. The printer is now working. Mozy’s big download ran for 18 hours and then crashed within 90 minutes of the end. They say it can be resumed if it is running within a download manager but that doesn’t seem to be so. Time for an external hard drive as well as Mozy, I think.
Downloading my life
This is absurd. The IT angst continues. For a person who is supposed to live in the ‘in between time’, I feel absurdly dependent on getting my past back. I have all the E Mails back and the other stuff is coming. The computer is at present working through a 33 hour download. It arrives in 7-Zip compressed files which seem to need a crowbar to get them open. But how unsettling it all is. Dependency. That’s what it is.
Basics
Well I survived Trinity Sunday. I regard it as the most difficult Sunday in the year for the preacher. I’d settle for a draw.
We were in Holy Trinity, Stirling – another church with growing numbers of children and their parents – or is it the same set moving around with me? And the children are involved in ministry too. I reached the back of the church at the end of the service and found a little girl whose task seemed to be to push in a wedge to hold the door open. Seemed pretty important to me.
And finally – today is the 40th anniversary of the death of Arthur Ransome – the author who has provided for many of us children an environment as safe and comforting as the Anglican Church. This is the classic passage from the start of Swallows and Amazons:
Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays. He ran until he nearly reached the hedge by the footpath, then turned and ran until he nearly reached the hedge on the other side of the field. Then he turned and crossed the field again. Each crossing of the field brought him nearer to the farm. The wind was against him, and he was tacking up against it to the farm, where at the gate his patient mother was awaiting him. He could not run straight against the wind because he was a sailing vessel, a tea-clipper, the Cutty Sark. His elder brother John had said only that morning that steamships were just engines in tin boxes. Sail was the thing, and so, though it took rather longer, Roger made his way up the field in broad tacks.
Elgar
150th Anniversary of Edward Elgar today. I’m very fond of his music – they’ve played a lot of it today and it seems to me to convey the essence of Englishness. I’ve been wondering how it is that music can so effectively summon up the essence of a culture or identity. Gershwin and America for example. Not so sure about Riverdance and Ireland.
I’m still fitting music to landscape around here – Elgar rather superficially gives me a blast of Land of Hope and Glory as I pass Glamis Castle. But it’s difficult because so much of it sometimes looks like France. The Tay is often like the Dordogne. The East Neuk of Fife can look like parts of Brittany and the prairies under big skies to the east of us are like much of central France. We were in Lochearnhead today – well to the west of Crieff and Comrie – no doubt that you are in Scotland there.
Kilvert
I’ve been dipping into Kilvert’s Diary again.
Old Mr Thomas the Vicar of Disserth … would get up in the pulpit without an idea about what he was going to say, and would begin thus, ‘Ha, yes, here we are. And it is a fine day. I congratulate you on the fine day, and glad to see so many of you here. Yes indeed. Ha, yes, very well. Now then I take for my text so and so. Yes. Let me see. You are all sinners and so am I.’
IT angst
Well – we’re into heavy computer issues here at Blogstead. The two of us in the house + Poppy require four computers, all of which must be functioning. Tim our minder has concluded that the hard disk on the computer in the family room needs to be replaced. So I’m hoping that all of our backups on Mozy.com are in good order. Alison’s laptop has mysterious overheating problems. That leaves only the desktop in the study and my laptop. Can we cope? Can life as we know it continue?
So what is it like?
Spent a while in prison this evening at the commissioning of a new Chaplain. I needed to leave and they told me I couldn’t – so there was an incarnational dimension to it. But what was, to be honest, surprising was the way in which prisoners came up to me and the other visitors and wanted to talk about anything and everything. And, as I have often found in prisons, it was sad to find how bright and articulate many of them are. What a waste. One of them made a real effort to describe the dehumanising character of the experience: ‘You want drinks of cool water and they give you glasses of sand’ and ‘You go in as a plum and come out as a raisin.’ Obviously I would not suggest that to be a prisoner of the Lord is a dehumanising experience – but the church .. I hope to get parole eventually.
Storm tossed
Interesting – in the light of my ‘standing by the sheets of the Cutty Sark with a loaded revolver comment – to see the arrival of Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth IV back in Plymouth after another circumnavigation. Chichester was amazing. He survived lung cancer and completed his voyage in 1967 – he also flew to Australia in 1929 in a Tiger Moth. He died in 1972. I visited Gipsy Moth when she was exhibited in London – not a big boat. One of the postcards which I sometimes send to people is a reproduction of a painting of Gipsy Moth rounding Cape Horn in a gale done by one of the Derek Hill school of painters on Tory Island – off the coast of Donegal.