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.

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.’

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?

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.

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.

Great to have the feet back on the ground today. We were in Kinross and suddenly found ourselves in a church awash with children. It’s a bit of a shock but a very welcome one. Our Diocesan Strategy makes a big fuss about the need to address the age profile of our congregations – and some of our churches are already very successful at working with children and their parents. One of the teenagers arrived and said that she had always wanted to wear a mitre – so that was the last I saw of it for a while. It was so big that it covered her head completely. Bamm Bamm – who knows about these things – tells me that there is a benign form of encephalitis which gives one a particularly large head. Unfortunately this does not mean that the internal spaces are filled by anything in particular.

Meanwhile over at Blogstead Emeritus, the servants are preparing for the return of +Bruce and Elaine from America later this week. I took a peep over the hedge and, so far as I could see, they were rolling the croquet lawn. One senses the coming of a few of those endless sunlit afternoons, Pimms, the gentle murmur of good conversation and the ‘thwack’ of mallet on ball.

It feels a bit as mother bird must feel when she pushes the fledglings out of the nest to fly for themselves. So last night we launched Paul, my final curate in Seagoe, on his new ministry on the Donegall Road in Belfast. Here’s the Sermon if you want to read it. There’s a sort of worrying-parent dimension to all this. But then Paul isn’t worried so why should I be?

It was great to meet my old friends from the parish. One of the strange things about parish ministry is that when you go, you go .. don’t look back .. close the door quietly behind you. But these are people whose lives were intertwined with ours for many years in good times and bad. So it’s painful to do that. Anyway, they all told me I was looking great and I said they hadn’t changed a bit either. And they asked me if I was having a good time in Scotland and I said it was all wonderful. They asked if I had a Scottish accent yet.  I said that was unlikely because I hardly ever heard one.  And half of them had been reading this blog anyway so they know as much about it as I do. The danger is that they may believe it.

I did think for a micro-second that it would be great to be back in the middle of it all again. But then I thought about the sheer hard work of it – and the grass growing in two acres of Rectory garden. So I thought instead about what a wonderful job Terence is doing. And then I stopped thinking about it.

Meanwhile, Poppy has returned to Blogstead from the capucchino belt in Edinburgh and is not a happy cat. She retreated in a sulk deep into the field of head-high oil seed rape – talked to us at some length from about 20 yards in – and eventually was retrieved by Alison.

I went to Portadown yesterday and walked up the street.  It was a bit like having a cameo role in a soap opera – actually I could happily have spent all day there.  Old friends – and the characters are always good.  I also took time for a hair cut with Michael, my favourite hairdresser.  Our encounter was about 75% chat and 25% hair cut – and we skipped the light dusting of talc to give that matt finish.

Meantime you may be wondering what the local papers are saying at this moment when Northern Ireland is entering a new and exciting phase of its history.  New relationships .. restorative justice … post-sectarianism …  healing of memories?  Sorry.  None of that.  The Belfast Telegraph last night devoted it’s entire front page to the discovery of a new spray-on version of Viagra – to be called Spray ‘n Stay.  What a country!

I’ve ended up back in Belfast to preach at my former colleague Paul’s Institution tomorrow.  There’s a tinge of Ted and Dougal here. This may be why the sermon is proving a bit elusive – Paul’s new parishioners will definitely not want to know if he ‘gives good Mass’.  With the wonders of modern technology, it was simpler to do what I do from here rather than go back to Perth for a day.

So as we waited for the plane to leave Birmingham last night, the announcement said that we would leave as soon as the plane had taken on SEVEN TONS of fuel.  Later on I was sitting on the floor in a quiet corner of a staircase in Belfast Airport because it was the only place I could find a plug for my laptop.  A kindly managerial person arrived and welcomed me to their electricity supply, ‘Use away at it,’ he said in best Belfast idiom.  ‘We make all our own electricity anyway.’

Why was I unable to leave Belfast Airport?  Because Alison and I were once again arriving in the same airport from different places and she was two hours after me.  Poppy, by the way, remains in the cappuchino belt of Bruntsfield and will return to Blogstead on Saturday.  Reports are that she is a bit more settled but still noisy – either high maintenance or just a spoilt cat.

This kind of conference is always interesting – bishops are by nature an interesting lot.  In a world of fairly narrow specialisms, they tend to be people who are interested in many things and only some of them esoteric.  The lists and organisation refer to geography – and have that rather sonorous ring of the stations at which a cross-country train calls or the advert in which Peter Ustinov used to read from Yellow Pages.  So we have Argyll, Barking, Birkenhead, Bolton, Buckingham….

I am sure that I was not the only one to smile this morning as the servants of the servants of God sang this verse of Isaac Watts:

High is the rank we now possess; And higher we shall rise; But what we later shall become; Is hid from mortal eyes.

Meanwhile I have been reading about the Cutty Sark.  I’ve always been interested in the great days of sail – reading the books of Alan Villiers and, of course, Hornblower.  One of the stories not reported today is that of the Captain/Master who would demand that yet more sail should be set as the clippers raced back from Australia.  It reached the point where he stood with a loaded revolver by the sheets/ropes – threatening to shoot the first person who slackened canvas.  Ah, the Pentecost wind filling the sails of the church?