don't look up my skirt unless you mean it

And to think I let him captain my magic carpet in my dream last night

2012-01-25T00:56:00.001Z

I got set some homework by my spiritual director to write something about what the last few weeks have been about. This is what I wrote.

So. The last few weeks. A few hundred hours that have seen me inexorably creeping towards the day, the hour, the minute, the second - the precise moment - of my death. That’s not a moment I ever really think about. It’s off, unseen, in the future, and I think about the future about as often as an apple does. The future’s like some abstract concept that’s so abstruse as to be rendered meaningless, a bit like wondering what precise thought at this exact moment in time is living in the mind of an accounts clerk living in Swindon. The only time the future ever figures prominently in my mind is thinking about what and when I’m going to eat next. So actually, I suppose, that means I’m thinking about the future for pretty much most of my waking time. But remove anything edible from the picture, and it’s fair to say I’m as short-sighted as a mole on dope when it comes to viewing life through the lens of time.

However the future’s been muscling in on my thinktank these last few weeks, albeit in a sneaky, indirect sort of way, by disguising itself as the present. For I’ve been feeling a growing agitation and frustration with my life as it is now, which has led to me thinking about what I might feel looking back from the hypothetical vantage point of the day of my death.

As 2011 uncomplainingly trotted towards its wintry demise I’d been feeling weighed down by a relentless fatigue and weariness. I reasoned that my job was playing a reasonably sized role in that, so I was looking forward to some time off over the Christmas holidays. And quite rightly so, for it was lovely having a three-week hiatus from the drudgery of being a faceless automaton doing an unfulfilling job in a field of work for which I care about as much a rat’s hairy left buttock.

Christmas Day itself serves as a handy little microcosm of what those three Yuletide weeks were like. It was a gently paced day of many parts that gave it movement and life, without ever really being overly tiring - a bit of time enjoying the green and sun outside, a spot of tasty time eating sodding good food, some quality time with friends, and fun time playing games. Because games are fun.

I didn’t realise quite how cathartic a time this was though until my first day back in the office. Half an hour sat at my desk was enough to prompt my one and only New Year’s Resolution. For those 30 long minutes had suddenly dragged me back into the familiar feelings of tiredness, apathy, unfulfilled-ness and frustration; they had pressed play again on the tape that would often be the soundtrack to my working day: an endless loop of me saying “I DON’T CARE” in a tired, apathetic, unfulfilled and frustrated voice. And so I resolved to not be doing the same job in a year’s time.

If I was more trusting I may well have quit there and then, but then that may not have left me with enough money to buy myself burritos, so I restrained myself. I envied Kate though, that she was able to pooh pooh her job when it was pooing all over her health, as I’m sure that putting my poor old body through this every day is playing silly buggers with my health.

Because I’m a clever old bean, though, I know full well that the rubbishness of my job is only part of a wider problem. I’m not just feeling tired, unfulfilled and frustrated in a multinational bank, but in much of life as well. And because I’m an insightful old bean I know full well that that frustration is directed at myself, and I’m tired of myself.

I’m tired of waiting, waiting for something where I don’t even know what it is, other than a new life that obviously isn’t going to magically appear or, more likely, an inevitable decline of my health and life.

I’m frustrated that I give in to fear and choose the safest, risk-free option. I’m unfulfilled by being closed, and by meeting an opportunity and looking for the reasons to say no. I don’t want to pass time, kill time, and to shrivel, shrink, waste and rot until I get to the end of my life and think, well, the food and cups of tea may have been lovely but really, was that it?

I want growth, depth, life, fullness. I want to experience fully, to taste fully, to hear fully, to express fully, to live fully, in all of life’s myriad highs and lows. I want divine union, and to feel that breath breathing through me.

I want to say yes. I want to believe in myself, and to not think I’m useless and incapable. I want sharpness - to sharpen and be sharpened. I want to share. I want to live with expectancy. I want to see obstacles as things to be overcome, not reasons to not even bother trying. I want a mirror, so I can see the times when my subconscious is sneakily making me settle for the illusion of safety without me even realising it. I want to move, and I want to move away from creating my own peace in a still but stagnant pool, and instead to find harmony in the life of the river. Along with some nice wild salmon, as I rather fancy cooking them up into some proper tasty treats.

Dogs can't look up.

2011-11-09T00:59:00.001Z

As with every single one of the 7 billion other souls housed within a mass of fleshy and bony protrusions that makes up the human race, 'me' is a few things. I have my own odd, barely palatable body, but I'm not just a physical entity. Those who know me well know that I have a personality that is the very antithesis of simple. But while I am clearly possessed of the kind of charismatic personality that fills and dominates a room, such that anybody who finds themselves in a room with me cannot help themselves but to incredulously remark: 'Golly', I am not just my psyche.

I am not just someone blessed with the sartorial elegance of a beard, or someone who only instinctively closes my right eye when having a shower. I do not only think that people who say they don't like fish are wrong (though they are). I am not solely someone who giggles at hamsters and I am not, contrary to popular opinion, someone whose only pleasure in life is cloud spotting while having a nice cup of tea & a sit down (though clearly the human race has discovered few more superlative pursuits.) I am not solely heterozygous for a mis-sense mutation of codon 150 of the glucokinase gene, and nor am I nothing but someone who is completely incapable of saying anything in Turkish other than 'Hey baby, what's shaking?'

So I am not just one facet of existence. Fittingly, there's a veritable smorgasbord of things that are, on one level or another, good for me, and a whole plethora of things that I can do that will be for the benefit of myself, that will energise me, nurture my soul and generally make me feel alive. If you're human though, you'll know that doing those things gets scuppered all too easily. My buggered memory is one of the things that most conspires to vex my ability to choose that which is good for me (and therefore for everybody else too). Partly this is a simple case of remembering what those things might be. I had fun the other day when I remembered that I rather enjoy getting the magazine from the weekend newspaper and graffiting it. I used to do it fairly regularly but got out of the habit, and subsequently forgot all about it. So it was a happy moment when, not sure what to do with myself one evening and really not wanting to spend an evening passively consuming in front of the gogglebox, I remembered this simple pleasure. I went to bed much more amused than I would have done otherwise.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were probably fairly easy ways to overcome this particular shortcoming of remembrance. Like, I dunno, keeping a list or something. But my memory also trips up my best intentions to choose life in a way that's not so easy to remedy. For I often forget the feelings of life and energy that can come from doing those things. Actually, that's not quite true. I may well remember, but what stops me choosing is that I don't trust enough in the moment that they will be good for me, and the still, small voice of my memory gets easily drowned out. So if I'm feeling shattered, for example, I'll naturally think that I don't have the energy to do anything other than watch telly. My memory might pipe up and point out that just watching any old telly is rarely good for me, and maybe I'd enjoy getting some fresh air by going outside for a minute to look at the clouds, or making myself chuckle by graffiting that big picture of Justin Timberlake on the front of the magazine. But that little voice gets shouted down with the claim that they will involve energy, and clearly my memory needed reminding that the lack of energy to do things is a fairly central part of being knackered.

One of those voices that often drowns out my memory belongs to my so-called loyal soldier - the bit of me that wants to protect and keep me safe. But it does it by keeping me small, stopping me from doing anything that might rock the boat by being too bold or expressive or exuberant or dangerous. So if I'm feeling somewhat lacking of energy, it'll say that shouldn't attempt to do anything as that'll only make me even more tired, and that could lead to a relapse. Or at work I might be bored and frustrated because I've not got enough to do, or anything to do at all that's even remotely interesting or fulfilling. I might start to wonder about asking my manager for some extra responsibilities because I've got a vague feeling that when I've done that in the past it's led to some good stuff that I've actually quite liked. But before I've even finished speculating, those thoughts get swiftly booted out of my head by a voice that says, don't be daft, doing that could mean having to do something where I haven't the foggiest what I'm meant to do and I'll no doubt end up failing and falling on my bottom. And we all know what I'll look like if I fall on my bottom don't we? That's right: an Arse. Nope, sonny Jim, you need to stay doing this mindless, repetitive task, confident in the knowledge that this is playing a vital role in ensuring my employer earns a profit of billions while contributing to the continued existence of an economic system that I have one or two disagreements with. Obviously If I were to fail at an extra task then that would bring the whole multinational business down, and I'm no expert but I'm pretty certain that will mean getting the sack. And then I wouldn't just look like an Arse. Even worse, I would look like an unemployed Arse. Not even good for wiping.

And then there's the list of values and principles that it insists I live: waste is Bad; spending money is Bad; public displays of emotion are Bad; now that I think of it, private displays of emotion are pretty Bad; doing anything that might cause someone to notice me is Bad; causing a bit of a kerfuffle is Bad; failing is Bad, and therefore risking doing something I might fail at is Bad; I may look really rather good in a skirt (and many people can testify to that), if I was to go out in public in a fetching 40s-style pencil skirt, that would be Bad... Sometimes these things can be contradictory, like trying to claim I have no energy to do anything but watch telly, but then insisting I get up to turn the TV off rather putting it on standby, for that would contravene Edict No.1.

Now I know I'm not going to be able to suppress or kill off this bit of me, and nor would I necessarily want to. I do agree with many of its laws - the planet might not be in such a bad way if we didn't waste its resources so much. And it is, after all, only trying to do what it thinks is good me for me, and I can't knock that. It just does it about as well as my body walks, which is to say about as well as Nick Clegg attempting to not look bored and/or constipated during Prime Minister's Questions. I suppose I could try and harness it's bossing powers so that it reminds me that watching telly all evening (even if I'm shattered) instead of getting some fresh air, or settling for the status quo instead trying something new or daring, will generally knacker my body and soul. I suppose that would make it sort of like The Terminator's transition in the sequal, albeit one that didn't destroy quite so much resources. And wore a skirt.

The poet doesn't invent. She listens.

2011-06-15T14:01:00.001+01:00

This blog post is both different and similar to my usual blog post. Different, because I didn’t actually write it. But similar because it’s still all about me, which you’re no doubt pleased to know. A friend of mine, Tess, is training to be a therapist. She needed to do a research project for her course and she asked if she could interview me, to try and understand in depth how it is for me to live with MS.

Instead of writing the project like a normal report, she felt drawn to write it much more like a poem. As she said in the report, “By offering my research in a slightly poetic format I was able to engage with and absorb Dan’s lived experience more deeply. Moreover, I found in writing this way the meaning and nuances within my encounter with Dan unfurled and stretched out in front of me. As Thomas Moore says of poetry ‘ [it] doesn’t seek an end to meaning’. I felt this method honoured the ambiguity and mystery inherent within a human life and within human relationships. Furthermore, the style allowed for the transience of the interview. I was so keenly aware that I spent only just over an hour with Dan and often in the process of this project I felt the weight of responsibility in trying to capture and share a whole existence from such a brief meeting. In writing this way I felt the immediacy and ephemeral nature of our time to together became part of the beauty of human encounter.”

And so the rest of this post is her work. It is a beautiful gift that left me both simultaneously proud and humbled to have been a part of.

‘I invite Dan to speak. I want to know how it is to be you I say. I see myself as enabling you to tell your story and I don’t really have any other agenda than that.

Here is Dan.

Here is Dan’s body. His body that in his twenties became an unknown for him and ushered in experiences that he had never had to deal with before.

Here is Dan’s body and the equipment he needs to get through the day: the wheelchair, the walking frame, the board across the bath to sit on, the catheter twice a day and the drugs. Here is the time it takes to have a shower. The effort it takes to take off his trousers, ‘when you can’t use your legs all that well’. How his feet can burn and prickle and the cold water he sometimes needs to calm them. How numbness in his fingers makes doing up a shirt button ‘tricky’. His tinnitus and tiredness while we are talking, his loss of concentration, his loss of memory, his difficulty in sleeping, ‘groggy’, ‘fog’, ‘heavy’, ‘haul’, the ‘faff’, the ‘faff’, the ‘faff’. And I wonder at what lies behind that word ‘faff’. How dismissive it seems and how it may hide the intricacy of the activities it describes. How it is a softer word than frustration and anger.

Here are Dan’s legs. Sometimes ‘fizzy’ and spasming and painful and how wearing that can be. The knuckle he might use to dig into his leg to trigger a spasm because sometimes a spasm is a relief. A relief from the tension that builds and builds in his calve.

Here is how Dan has learned his body’s nuances, like nurturing a newborn baby, slowly determining what each cry and whimper might mean. How he talks to his body and his legs and soothes them:

'I used to get so frustrated with my legs and I wanted to just punch them and shout ‘fucking leave me alone’. Whereas now I’m much more like with a baby where they’re quite distressed and you want to soothe it and calm and almost listen to it and say ‘OK why are you upset?’'

I feel that as his body does things he cannot control, and cannot prevent, and sometimes cannot soothe or stop, it is almost as if his body is not of himself but a different creature altogether. I hear in his words that Dan’s body is both him and not him, a splitting of sorts. They are in relationship, a dialogue, a negotiation.

And here is the pacing. Pacing because fatigue is a ‘biggy’. Fatigue that can feel like a crap car with no power, even when he puts his foot down. Thus each activity is peppered amongst naps and stops, ‘spacing it out a bit helps a lot’. Food chopped, cooked, and eaten over time. Part-time work and not doing things straight afterwards. Here is the knowledge that if he pushes past what he knows he can do there are consequences, he pays the price. Pain, more tiredness and maybe a relapse.

And here is the relapse. Feared and unknown. He does not know when it will come just that probably it will as it has done before. And with a relapse comes fear and new learning and new losses. Perhaps more things his body cannot do. And describes how each relapse will send him round the cycle of grief again: avoiding thinking about it, filling his space with distractions, pinning his hopes on steroids, worry, depression. He is in that avoidant place right now, he confesses. He has niggling thoughts, a feeling that although he has been stable for a while his legs are getting weaker and he doesn’t want to think about it too much. Because Dan knows MS is a degenerative disease. He can project forward in his imagination and see a time when he is bed ridden and unable to feed himself. And he has to live with that image, knowing it to be a possibility.

And what helps with these images and this fear? What helps is what brings life and energy and creativity. Things where Dan feels ‘me’: nature and trees and green things and cloud watching and writing and journaling and blogging. Things that nurture his soul and connect him with God. He also finds voices and ideas that give hope, value, and worth to his experience. Voices and ideas that help him to see that this unlooked for painful experience has drawn him into the deeper mysteries of life, down past the everyday into a land of complex thought and wonderment.

And here Dan speaks of the ‘dark night of the soul’. A place where he knows his own loneliness and separation from others. Whilst everyone at their core is alone he says, his is more apparent. And he doesn’t want to be different or to be singled out. But he cannot escape it. His disability confronts him with it. And he is reminded of that time, that time a few years ago, when he was at his worst, spasms, fatigue, no sleep, no sleep, no sleep. And he thought - if I have just one more bad night’s sleep, that’s it, I give up. But that night he slept OK and then he got powerful drugs which seeped through his body offering a peace of a sort. But he remembers that despair vividly. He feels the emotion now as we speak: ‘not a person’, ‘out of control’, ‘isolation’, ‘totally dead’. And he remembers how angry he was with God, ‘where the fucking hell are you?’ How utterly abandoned by him he felt ‘you fucking shit’.

'This isn’t what my many years in church has told me was going to happen, I was given no framework for this and it was like the foundations, everything that you’ve built your life on, that form the fundamental part of your world view, have suddenly just shattered and your just left with this rubble and you think, well what the fuck am I meant to do now! Which is why since then my journey has been discovering that I know there are foundations that I can build my life on and there is a deeper reality than what I’ve been told from church.'

And yet, despite this Dan still believes in God. But a different kind of God. A God who inhabits the term ‘a good God’ learned in church, but differently, more creatively. A God who can deal with the ‘shit’. And in facing his own pain and finding these deeper realities he is able to bare witness to and hear the pain of others in a way he wasn’t able to do before. He shares this wisdom with MS sufferers on internet forums. He is able to offer them hope as these voices and beliefs offer him hope.

Listening to Dan I feel that these beliefs and thoughts and processes are key, fundamental to his existence. He speaks most eloquently and extensively on this topic over the course of the hour. I feel it interests him, fuels him, and drives him. Grappling with ideas such as these seem to have saved him from utter despair and to have given his life meaning, purpose and depth. I am touched deeply as I listen. Moved that he has battled so hard not only with his body but with these big existential questions. I feel he could so easily have slipped entirely into self-pity or into distracting activities but he has chosen to face his suffering head on, grip it with his hands and work with it. When he talks about ‘the dark night of the soul’ I feel like I am listening to someone twice Dan’s age, a sage, a hermit, a wise man.

And here are the people in Dan’s life. The long pause as he thinks about how his MS affects his relationships. Here are his friends and how he says his MS hasn’t changed their way of relating. And how he doesn’t have much to say about that, he’s never really asked them and they’ve never really said. He says he can be quite oblivious sometimes and not self-aware. I don’t pursue him on this, but I wonder how something so life changing to body and soul cannot effect friendships. I am curious about this oblivion and lack of awareness after hearing him speak so deeply and honestly about his suffering and his beliefs. I wonder if I talked to his friends if they would say the same thing. Perhaps they would. And here also, as I ask quite generally about the other people in his life, I expect him to volunteer thoughts about his family, the siblings and parents I know from other conversations he has, but he doesn’t. And again I don’t pursue. It makes me think that perhaps it is enough for Dan to contemplate the suffering his MS has caused his own soul and body. Perhaps to ponder at the difficulties his MS, both in its discovery and over time, may have caused others would just be too painful. I fantasise that why he hasn’t asked others, the oblivion, and the lack of self-awareness on this issue is a form of protection. And perhaps this is why his friends haven’t said things to him either.

But when I ask specifically about his wife, he is very forthcoming. She is a companion ‘we’ve gone on this whole journey together’. A fellow traveller who with her own struggles with ME knows and shares in some of his frustrations. He speaks of how their relationship gives him meaning, and purpose, and a reason to keep going. He feels lucky and grateful to have her. He knows of other MS suffers whose partners haven’t been able to handle the situation, partners who have left, walked out. But he cannot help but feel like a ‘weight’ and a ‘shackle’. He is anxious about the future for her and imagines how his decline will affect her and the burden he might be. And yet, he chooses to see this as a motivator for engaging with life so that his wife isn’t married to a ‘shell’. He loves that they can engage with life together and journey into its depths ‘two is better than one’.

And here is Dan’s bemusement with strangers. How he is interested by their reactions to him. How it is foreigners and immigrants who will offer to push him up hills not white English people. Offers which he usually does not accept as he wants the exercise, as well as the independence. And how people some will talk to the person pushing his wheelchair rather than to him. And just as I wonder whether his detached observations cover a deeper resentment - here is Dan’ passionate anger with those who park in disabled bays and other ‘evil people’, he jokes, who ignorantly make using a wheelchair more difficult. Here is the note he left on a driver’s windscreen once ‘you have my parking space, how about having my disability’. And how the lady returned to her car but didn’t see the note, she just drove off, ‘[I] felt a little bit deflated’. And while he knows people are just people that they don’t do it maliciously and not always on purpose he wants them to feel ashamed of their behaviour and their ignorance. This is the most animated I have seen Dan as we have chatted. As the anger stirs within him I think about how vibrant and vivid he seems. That maybe his anger is a way of asserting his existence to those who do not see and do not want to think about him and others with disability. I think that his anger holds power within it and how that feeling of power must contrast with the feelings of being out of control and being a burden that he has described already.

And here is me and Dan, here in this moment, in his flat at the end of our time together. And I am aware I have powerful, nagging thoughts about before he was ill and after. He has not mentioned before while we have been talking. I wonder if he has these thoughts too, thoughts he hasn’t mentioned so far. So I ask. And in asking I learn that Dan does not think in these terms ‘it’s been so long’ he says, ‘I don’t really remember’. And then he speaks of seeing himself as more deluded before, caught up in his self-importance, superficial, and avoiding any ‘inner work’. He can remember things that he could do with his body but he doesn’t give details and he doesn’t seem to speak with nostalgia. He sometimes has dreams, he says, where he is much better and surprises himself by being able to walk or run, ‘blimey’. But so powerful a dichotomy is before and after in my head, I am curious that Dan doesn’t have more to say. But then, he offers another thought ‘if things were different maybe I wouldn’t have got ill … how much of this is psychosomatic?’ And although he knows it is complex and there are many factors involved I wonder whether this is a difficult thought to think and a reason not to dwell too much in the past ‘what’s done is done’ he says. And here I find myself agreeing. For it seems to me that these are damning thoughts that perhaps house thorns such as personal responsibility, and guilt, and what ifs.

So I wonder at myself and why I had such a strong sense of wanting to know about before and after. What does this say about how I view Dan and illness and life changing events?

And here are two things I know about Dan that are not recorded but that flow into this taped narrative and help create Dan in my mind’s eye. Two things I returned to Dan with later and asked if I could share because I feel they add something to his story that we did not cover in our interview. The first is his recent sky dive for charity. The months he had waited to do it because the weather conditions needed to be just right because he can’t use his legs properly. How the straps of his harness dug into his thighs. How odd and amusing it was to be strapped to the main guy in the plane on the way up, sat on his lap. The serene float down to earth after the parachute was pulled. The beautiful pictures I have seen of this event, Dan saluting the cameraman as they are in free fall. How thrilling and awe-inspiring he found it, ‘it was proper awesome’. How his eyes light up when he talks about it. How he would do it again. The second is the memoirs he is writing. How his mind has encapsulated some memories, making it difficult to place in a timeline. How he realises he only has his own perspective on his experiences with MS so he is checking in with other others in his life and asking how it was for them. And how, despite Dan inviting them to be candid, ‘they generally said about being impressed by how strong I was. I'm sure they were, but that also feels like quite a British way to answer.’ His curiosity of others intrigues me and seems like a contrast to his oblivion and lack of self-awareness he spoke of in the interview.

Here is Dan opening a small window into who he is, as he sees himself, today. Here is Dan using words that can never fully describe a complex physical world and an intricate inner life that I have not experienced, ‘I don’t know how to describe it’ he says at one point. Words that reach across the gap from him to me and mingle with my story and my thoughts. And how the space between us changes these words into relationship, and understanding, and confusion, and curiosity, and knowledge. How both of us in ways yet unknown leave this interview changed.
And I am aware that now minutes, hours, days, weeks and months have passed since this interview. How Dan will have changed, new experiences, new thoughts, and the words he might use now, here in this moment, could be very different. And I marvel at human beings, how unique we are and how we strive so hard to share how it is to live in our own skin.’

I'm gonna mess you up so badly, Stick Man, that when I'm finished with you, you're just gonna be a scribble

2011-05-17T22:10:00.000+01:00

Oh dear, it's been nearly three months since I last properly blogged (the last post doesn't count, a bit like how your vote in an election probably won't count). I feel I should hang my head in shame. Don't know why - it's not like I have a contract with anyone for a quota of blogging output. And it's not like anyone reads this blog anyway, so no one would know. If anything I might have a tiny expectation placed on me by my good merry self. And by 'good merry self' I mean that bit of my self that believes in "should"s and tries to beat me over the head, albeit very lazily, with a stick saying that I need to earn my acceptance or validity by being a certain kind of person, and if I can't even write a blog post every couple of weeks then that's proof that I am a miserable failure as a human being (and it better be a good post at that, don't think you can get away with posting some useless twoddle about how brilliant clouds (which they are) and how I saw nice cloud yesterday that looked like a 6-legged hamster playing football with David Hasselhoff's head (which I didn't)).

I'm almost tempted to now refuse to write any more of this post, simply as a way of sticking two cheerfully benign fingers up at that stick-wielding self and to show it who's boss. But sod it, here's a post.

I read this quote the other day, from a Richard Rohr book I'm reading: "...until you are excluded from any system you are not able to recognise the lies, idolatries or shadow side of that system."

That's something I'm both unfortunately and fortunately able to relate to. Unfortunately because I'd have had little experience of being excluded if it wasn't for the fact that I have an incurable degenerative neurological disease. Having MS is often a bit of an unpleasant arse. And also unfortunately because it's just not that fun being excluded. Most people want to be on the inside; it's safer and warmer and more cuddly and gives you a positive identity, making you feel like you're somebody. Just look at how homogenised our society is becoming. Being excluded means you're stinky and no one likes you. Because you're stinky.

But I say fortunately because, as the book goes on to say, "It is the privileged 'knowledge of the victim'. It opens up the playing field granting equal access to all if they want it, because it is no longer a winner's script, which the ego prefers to make it, but actually a life script that includes these so-called losers." Sometimes being excluded has felt a bit like waking up from a daze. It's meant I've started to uncover what feels like a deeper reality. Obviously being on the inside of any group isn't all lies, or even mostly lies. But I reckon the boundaries between what's real and what's illusion can become blurred. Being excluded has also meant I've started to notice the insignificant and found something beautiful. And that's been nurturing and freeing for the soul, because it means I'm more likely to be able to find beauty and truth regardless of my situation.

To be honest, I know a part of the reason I like the quote is because of my own shadow side. At times I have a propensity to fall into the trap of wanting to be the one who's right. Being on the inside of who's right is something I can let motivate my words all too easily; it's why I can frequently get caught up in political debates on Facebook (though I like to think that's something that's made even easier by the Tories being so obviously, ignorantly wrong.)

As an example of the quote, I'm a white male living in a pasty-skinned patriarchal society. Now, I'm pretty adept at spotting racism and sexism when they're as subtle as a punch in the face. Yet I'm never going to be able to really appreciate how much those prejudices may be subtly woven into the fabric of our society. I don't want to be a victim of racism or sexism. So being a fine upstanding sort of gent, I'd like to know where I'm tacitly colluding with it and, therefore, perpetuating it.

I think if I didn't experience that 'knowledge of the victim', and was blind to the experiencing the value in the insignificant, then I'd feel a little bit bereft. Or in other words, I'd feel excluded. Which is ironic.

No. I don't talk about the jellybean incident. That's one wound that'll take too long to heal.

2011-04-30T01:14:00.001+01:00

Come Thursday this week those of us with nothing better to do will pootle off to our local polling station to say whether we want to change our voting system, so that it better reflects the way we used to decide what video to rent from Blockbuster. I've grown a bit tired of the No2AV campaign, what with it's scaremongering and treating us like we're a bunch of simpletons. I received the latest flyer from them through the door, filled with the usual diatribe and contradictory statements, like that we could end up with people's fifth choice candidate winning, ignoring the fact that under First Past the Post we have a PM that over 60% of the population didn't want. So in response I sent the following email to the No2AV campaign, with the subject title 'Thank you for helping me decide which way to vote':

To whom it may concern

When it comes to all things political I've generally known whether I naturally dress to the left or the right. Despite this, the AV debate has proven to be a more nebulous affair and I've had a rather abstruse time in deciding which way to vote. However after a jolly pleasant lunch out with my wife for our fourth wedding anniversary, I arrived home to discover the latest leaflet from your seemingly ubiquitous advertising campaign. I eagerly devoured the contents of the leaflet, much like I devoured the mezze I had for my lunch, in the hope that this would aid me in my quest to decide which voting system would best serve this great nation that we call Britain.

Well praise the gods!, for your leaflet has meant I have now seen the light; where I once was lost, I now have found the way to vote. So where will I place my hallowed 'X' on May 5th? I will place it emphatically in the box that says.........wait for it........the suspense is building.............I bet you can't wait to find out..........here it is: YES TO AV!!!!!!! Ta da!

I was fairly sympathetic to the merits of First Past the Post. However, I didn't read anything positive within the confines of your literature regarding how the current system is the best or fairest; I found not a whiff of any mention of its merits. Instead, I was greeted with the malodorous whiff of lies and frankly pathetic, childish scaremongering. £250m to pay for AV? Even though you know the Treasury and Electoral Commission have said electronic voting machines won't be needed? And Nick Clegg will always decide who becomes PM? You mean even after his death his re-animated corpse be wheeled every 5 years to anoint the winner?

Lamentably, the frightful behaviour of this negative campaigning has pushed this upstanding citizen just too far. Your conduct simply hasn't been cricket, and not the sort of behaviour becoming of any decent English lady or gentleman. I expect if you were to find yourself confronted with a queue you would think nothing of pushing in.

I find myself desirous of blowing your campaign a raspberry. Indeed I would blow you a right royal raspberry given the chance, only the modern medium of our electronic mail is not altogether conducive to such physical acts. Nevertheless: consider yourselves raspberried. (I am aware that there may well be an emoticon, even an animated emoticon, that attempts to mimic the act, however I'm sure you'll agree that emoticons are boorish and crass.)

Good day sir

Daniel Cooper, MSc.

Don't make me drink yogurt. It makes my teeth cough.

2011-02-28T21:29:00.000Z

Take a stroll down a typical British street and chances are it'll be filled with litter, there'll be some hoodies getting pissed on the street corner, you'll walk past bland overpriced shops with TVs in the window showing our overpaid national football team rubbishly losing; everybody you walk past will ignore you, you'll discover someone's just nicked your wallet (and no one did anything to help), and then you'll almost certainly notice there aren't any politicians around, because they're too out of touch with everyday people.

Yeah, I'm proud to be British. No, really, I genuinely am. I once did an on-line quiz to see how British I am, the results of which showed that I am Bloody British, which made me so jolly happy I had a nice cup of tea and a scone.

One thing I don't like our Britishness though is the idea of the Stiff Upper Lip. I know that this was a trait which served us well when it was invented back in the war, being an integral part of our ability to keep calm and carry on. The problem is that this has become so ingrained in our national psyche that we think this is the epitome of the way we should be. Any acknowledgement that we may be anything less than resolutely strong in the face of adversity is something to be ashamed of, and admitting to feeling a tiny bit sad is tantamount to Winston Churchill waiving the white flag and handing the keys to No. 10 over to Hitler.

I first began to notice this on the forum on the MS Society website. Whenever anyone puts a post up to say that they're struggling with how they're feeling, they almost invariably apologise, saying I'm sorry for moaning and normally I'm so strong and keep it together, I don't know what's happened to me. Now I know MS can mess with our think-tanks a bit, but in these cases it's our national identity that has caused us to lose any sense of perspective. You've got a bloody incurable degenerative disease, that's what's happened to you! If you're permanently shattered, can't walk, have had to give up work, your partner's walked out on you and, oh bugger, you've just wet yourself, I think it's probably fair enough that maybe you're feeling a touch angry or depressed.

Whenever anyone goes through a grievous life event it can be easy to pass comment on how well or badly they're coping. All you need to do is apply the simple formulas 'Feeling sad/being angry/not behaving 'normal' = Coping Badly' and 'Effecting a congenial persona/behaving acceptably = Coping Well'.

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. I was going to say if your top lip is especially stiff then, if anything, that means you're not coping well, but I don't that's true either. It probably just means you're in denial, and that's a normal part of grieving, giving you time to adjust before you can dare to lift the trapdoor on whatever scary, painful (but certainly not bad) feelings you've got lurking downstairs. So I don't think there's such a thing as coping well or badly. We simply cope the way we're coping. I guess the worse you can do is to get stuck in any particular feeling or get unhealthily attached to a coping mechanism, but even then that will depend on what support you've got around you, what you've seen modelled, or what type of personality you have. Having said that, if you were to embark on a violent crime spree because you lost your job, I'd be tempted to say you weren't coping all that well. But still, there's nothing wrong with feeling a bit upset or noticing a little quiver in your upper lip because of it. It doesn't mean you're a pathetic, shameful failure of a human being.

So. Feel sad if you're feeling sad. Just as long as you don't go mawkishly turning on the waterworks with the faux sincerity of an X Factor contestant. That just wouldn't be cricket.

I can see your future. And— Oh. You just had the best bit.

2011-02-10T15:03:00.000Z

Many moons ago, quite possibly on a Thursday (though just as likely on a Monday), there was a quote I heard, can't remember who said it, but it was 'If you can accept a stone 100%, it's enough to convert you'. It's been one of those ones where I never really understood what it meant but it's still stuck with me, swimming round in some murky backwater of my brain, getting up to no good with my sense of urgency. I knew the accepting bit was to do with not needing to change anything - not needing your nose to be a bit straighter, or wishing there wasn't a stinky person sat next to you on the bus, or that your spouse would learn to stop squeezing the toothpaste from the middle, or wishing Lord of the Rings: Return of the King didn't have that ridiculous slow-motion, 'You-have-been-watching,-in-order-of-appearance' bit near the end (or, now I think of it, pretty much every scene in the entire trilogy with Frodo in it), or wishing that people would stop writing 'LOL' at the end of a text or comment that quite clearly ISN'T FUNNY (honestly, ask yourself if anyone has ever written that after a comment that was genuinely funny. At best you would have just made a slightly more forceful than normal exhalation through your noise. Maybe they should write MASMFTNETYN instead.)

(I should quickly point out that I'm not saying that Lord of the Rings wouldn't be better without Elijah Wood pathetically rolling his eyes up into the back of his head, or that the world wouldn't be better without big nasty powerful people groups being downright mean to little people groups, or that we shouldn't do anything to speak our against that kind of injustice. They would and we should, but that's not what is meant here. And I'm not going to explain why. This is my blog post and I don't have to if I don't want to. In fact, you can't do anything about what I write in this blog post. If I want to write 'mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmaasdooifhsdjcmybumismadeofbutterflieszzzzz.o.o.o' then I shall. See - I just did. You're just going to have to deal with it.)

But anyway, I wasn't sure what they meant by conversion and, more specifically, why not needing to change anything was already enough for that to happen. Then the other day I think I had a tiny bit of a glimpse into what they meant, and it was a little wondrous delight. I'd decided to perambulate gently up to the local park. As I ambled up I decided to simply be mindful - to notice the sights and smells, and to notice how my body felt.

The very first thing I noticed was the aroma of freshly baked hot cross buns emanating from the back of Tesco. My initial response was to have the sort of grumpy old man rant that involved the word 'bloody' an awful lot. I don't know when Easter is but it feels far too far away to think about stocking the shelves with hot cross buns. But then I found myself letting it go - shops always need to get stock in early, ready to fill the shelves, and I suppose that's fair enough. I might personally think that's too early, but then hot cross buns are rather tasty and I doubt the taste buds of Britain will be complaining too much. So I just accepted it.

Then I began to notice the ends of my fingers start to freeze up on the jolly cold metal push rims of my wheelchair, which hurt slightly, and all the more so every time my fingers caught on something. But I found that, rather than complaining about it and wishing it was warmer, I wondered instead why being cold means things hurt more. (It turns out I don't know). When I got to the park, I stopped to get my breath and watch the clouds. I noticed that I felt like I needed to park by a bench even though I was already seated, and felt the gently pleasant tingle of my fingers warming up, coupled with the uncomfortable tingle of my feet starting to get cold. The latter's not a feeling I usually enjoy as my legs tend to spasm in response. Again though, somehow I didn't feel the need to wish anything was different - that it wasn't so sodding cold, or that I didn't get these weird sensory things in my body, or that the weird sensory things were lovely cuddly feelings instead of painful for a change. And that kept happening - that quote wasn't on my mind at all but everything I saw and heard I simply accepted for what it was, without needing to put any kind of value judgement on it, or without being affected emotionally.

Then when I started to come home I found that I felt open. I wasn't really sure what to specifically. It was like I'd gone from sitting with my shoulders slightly hunched and looking down with the suggestion of a frown on my brow, to sitting upright, my brow lifted and my eyes open wide. I think it was simply I'd gone from being closed to having an emotional/mental/spiritual an openness to life. An openness to receive whatever there was to receive and to give whatever there was to give, to learn from it all and to let it change me. And I suppose being open is the beginning of any conversion experience, whatever it is you're converting to. Because I didn't feel the need to change anything, even though none of it was 'perfect', I was ready to be converted to the fundamental goodness of life.

It's like everyday life was inviting me to be its friend and share a nice pot of tea, and wondered if maybe I wouldn't mind not deciding I already knew all there was about it, or deciding that it should be different before I'd even got to know it. It's only by accepting something first that I can journey with it - I can only start a journey from where I am, not where I'm not. Wishing my circumstance was different denies me that journey. As a crappy example, before I can begin any journey I have to accept that I'm sat at the computer in my flat in Sheffield, and that I can't really walk. Wishing I was healthy and owned a house in the country is all good and well, but not much help if I want to consider how to get into the city centre. So maybe by accepting things 100%, I can begin to see that, as Richard Rohr says, what's on the inside is bigger than what's on the outside.

So that was all nice. If a little cheesey. ROFL!

as she lent in for a kiss, he couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to have a hand instead of an eye

2011-01-01T15:36:00.000Z

Coalitions, cuts, bigots, vuvuzelas, leaking wikis, white stuff...2010 has been another momentous year, in which Stuff has Happened. Some of it has been Good Stuff, and some of it has been...wait for it...Bad Stuff. Fairly typical year then I suppose. Anyway, here are my awards for 2010.

Best Word: 'Omphaloskepsis' - contemplation of one's navel as part of a mystical exercise.

Most Euphonious Phrase: 'cellar door'. Ignore the meaning, close your eyes and say it, whisper it, feel the sound of it. Beautiful.

Best Friend: Maths. Maths is brilliant. For a surprise birthday treat Kate took me to see a public lecture by Marcus Du Sautoy, head of Mathematics at Oxford University. You're probably thinking it was all big confusing equations and proofs but you're wrong. It was all about how Maths is beautiful. Which it is. (Here's the first part of a documentary he did with Maths-phobe funny man Alan Davies, well worth an hour of your time - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cu4_Vd6TTw

Best Joke #1: "There is no systematic corruption in Fifa. That is nonsense, we are financially clean and clear." - Sepp Blatter. (Have a look at the bottom of the post for some Fifa highlights.)
Best Joke #2: Raymond Domenech (because he is a mental) and the French national football team.

Most Over-hyped Film: Inception. It was resolutely OK. And if you disagree, ask yourself if you cared about any of the characters, or if Cobb's relationship with his wife was in any way believable, or if you gave a monkeys bottom about what was essentially some corporate sabotage. So, an interesting idea and some great effects, but that's all.

Best Armchair Activist: Me. Among other things, I wrote to George Osborne, finishing my letter by pointing out that his second home expenses were twice what Kate and I live off.

Potentially Biggest Decision: Not saying, but if it pays off you'll know about it.

One of the Greatest Days of My Life #1: I put plastic bra on my head, I got strapped to a man named Noel. I got into a plane. The plane went 3 miles high. I jumped out. I fell for 2 miles. If you want a challenge this year, do it yourself - pick a charity, raise some money, jump out of a plane and savour the experience. Utterly amazing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVP8Fot8yI4
One of the Greatest Days of My Life #2: After watching Pompey win the FA Cup a couple of years ago, in April I went to Wembley to see Pompey take on Tottenham Hotspur in the FA Cup semi-final. I was fully expecting Spurs, managed by traitor Harry Redknapp and with several of our former players, to batter us. After extra time we beat them 2-0. It was simply amazing, better even than when we won the cup.

Next Best Thing to Being Spoken to By God: We went to see Daniel Kitson, the funniest, most life affirming man I've ever seen, do a show about his old flat (which was funny and life-affirming). At the end we stayed behind to look at some of his props (some beautiful scale models of his flat) and as we started to leave, we heard a voice from the back say 'Thanks for coming'. It was Daniel himself. I'd have asked him if he fancied a nice cup of tea but I got all nervous, so I blurted out 'Thank you for having us'. He has a good beard.

Finally, 2010 also saw The Single Greatest Thing I've Ever Seen In My Life. Honestly, I'm just in awe of this. Every time I watch it I laugh in wonder. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=081dHOYY6IE

(Here are some highlights from Fifa, taken from the Observer's excellent Said & Done column:

Best individual performance: Executive Committee member Amos Adamu – caught in the bribery sting four months after telling colleagues facing separate fraud charges how they should behave. "The public sees every football administrator as corrupt, and I cannot explain why it is so. We must always be transparent to prove them wrong!"

• Runner-up: Former ExCo member Ismael Bhamjee – caught in the same sting, four years after his first one: exposed in 2006 for touting World Cup tickets at three times face value to supplement his £270 daily Fifa expenses. "I got myself in a mess," Bhamjee said at the time. "This was out of character."

• Best award: Former ExCo member Viacheslav Koloskov – travelling to Asunción in October to lobby current ExCo member Nicolás Léoz for Russia's bid. Léoz (accused by Panorama of taking £450k in bribes) honoured Koloskov (who received an unauthorised £65k payment from Sepp in 2002) with an award for "services to football and its principles".

• Best analysis: also from Koloskov – greeting the publication of the bids' expensive technical reports in November: "I know from my own experience that ExCo members work with little information. The inspection reports are enormous, so no one reads them."

• Best timing: October – Russia's sports minister Vitaly Mutko attacks the British press for "obsessive" analysis of Russia's racism record. Also that month: Russian football agent Vladimir Abramov gives an interview to Sport.ru about how Nigerians ruin Russian cities with "their drugs, and ultimately, their Aids". Abramov: "Teams shouldn't have more than one dark-skinned footballer. When there's more than one they are aggressive"; plus: "I am very respectful towards blacks, but Russia isn't ready for them." FIfa's view: "Racism will not be taken into account in the bidding process … It is not an operation matter".

• Best outrage: Mutko again, on why attention from the English press left him exasperated. "No matter what we say we are portrayed by them as a hotbed of corruption. It is not true." Later that week: Russian authorities launch a criminal investigation into alleged fraud at Mutko's ministry, including Mutko's own expenses claim for 97 breakfasts eaten during a 20-day trip to Vancouver.

• Best defenders: Fifa ExCo members on the "slanders" against Sepp's process:

1) Jérôme Valcke (sacked in 2006 for "lying repeatedly" to potential sponsors and reappointed by Sepp in 2007): "We have done everything we can to make sure this process is fair and transparent."
2) Chuck Blazer (called a liar "without credibility" by a US judge in 2006): "You can't say the system is bad just because one newspaper created a scam, a trap."
3) Jack Warner (totally clean): "We preach equity… we live by our principle of fair play!"
4) Plus: Angel María Villar Llona – making an epic address to colleagues in Zurich: "I love Fifa dearly but those I love the most are my colleagues in the ExCo. Recently we have been criticised by certain media, but unfortunately for them, Fifa is a clean institution. We have heard enough slander. This process is clean – whatever they say!")

I'm gonna empty my mind into your face. You've been warned.

2010-12-24T01:23:00.000Z

It's proper enigmatic the spiritual journey. It excites and vexes in equal measure, and usually for exactly the same reason. I love that it can't be contained, can't be rationalised or figured out - that it's an essence that hints at possibility, at new depths, drawing me on. And I get grumbly that I can't figure it out in my think-tank, that I don't know know what to do with the excitement when I hear something that awakens a sense of longing.

I suppose that's exactly the point though. Much of true spirituality is about letting go, and what gently mocks my false self is that I can't possess it. I can't own it. It's always bigger than me. So I need to learn to let go. I guess it's a bit of an oxymoron to think that I can figure life out, to own it. I might as well say I want to own a taste. I think food can be so much more enjoyable and satisfying when it's a gift, when the food doesn't owe me anything and when I'm not relying on it to give me a sense of worth or meaning or validation. That's probably why, since being ill, I've engaged more this kind of spirituality rather than what's offered by more mainstream church. Much of the evangelical church is about possessing and gaining, which is great, but I'm having to deal with losing my health. So of course I'm going to find more to feed me from those who've found the rich beauty in letting go.

The idea of letting go can be pretty scary though. And energising. It sounds painful, and a big reason it's painful is because I'm addicted to stuff, be it possessions, or relationships, or health, or status, or ability, or feelings, or the self image I want to project. Having any of those things taken away will hurt because I've put my identity in them. My security is in them and I'm scared I'll fall over if they're taken away. Essentially, I'm afraid that there'll not be a happy answer to the question of, what will define me if I let go of any of these things? What if it turns out I'm just a blob of nothing, shapeless, though with a suspicious hint of the outline of Southampton? If I'm not a victim or not someone who lords it over others, then who the blazes am I?

And yet, it's exciting... It probably takes a surprisingly whopping amount of energy to hold on to all these things that I'm afraid to lose. Imagine not being afraid of anything? I guess that'll be the ultimate freedom. As Funkadelic sang, 'Freedom is being free of the need to be free'...

Not sure how to end to end this post. I suppose I'll just stop typing.

Next week I'm going to have my body amputated

2010-12-14T18:51:00.000Z

There's snow outside, it's cold, the sun barely drops in to say hello any more, the shops are rammed full of miserable looking people spending money on things in an attempt to fulfil some sense of duty but that'll end most likely end up in a charity shop/landfill/the back of the cupboard: all annually recurring events that can only point to one thing at this time of year. You guessed it, it's time for the round robin Christmas newsletter. Here's mine...

This year I jumped out of a plane.

Get me. I'm brilliant. Come on, admit it. You want to be me. You've done nothing to match me. What's that? Your son got a good school report? Yeah? Well, I jumped out of a plane. At 3 miles high. And fell for 2 miles. Now go and look at your child, and I think you'll find that the pride you were feeling at that good report has now been replaced with an empty feeling of despondent futility. You're probably now wanting to hang your head in shame, which I heartily recommend and will also be quite fitting. For whilst your eyes are gazing down at your lap, you can consider how it's your loins that started this whole sorry affair.

I hope your next year is better.

Don't stitch too fast or the needles might ricrochet

2010-11-23T21:56:00.000Z

It's Blogging Tuesday today and I have nothing to say. I didn't have anything to say last Blogging Tuesday either. I was thinking that this blogging impotence made a contemptuous sneering mockery of my month-old resolution to blog more regularly (every Tuesday in fact). But maybe it's a good thing that I have nothing to say. Society is full of people's opinions about stuff that they know nothing about, not really. And the internet has about twice as much opinion as that, 92.3% of it being hot air and rubbish poo. And we all then vomit up whatever it is we've read or heard or seen in an attempt to make us feel important about ourselves. That's my opinion anyway.

I was about to launch into a blog post pontificating about our addiction to opinion, but that would be failing to listen to myself at the start of this post, namely that I have nothing to say and maybe that's a good thing. So instead of hearing what I have to say, which you'll probably forget about in half as much time as it would take to hear it, I'll give you the space instead to go and hear from yourself.

.

Sigh of a ninja

2010-11-09T22:05:00.000Z

I enjoyed BBC2's recent series The Big Silence, where 5 eager saps experimented with entering into the friendly/scary/mystical/boring/endless world of being in silence, under the tutelage of a cuddly Benedictine abbot. The programme revolved around an 8 day silent retreat they had, where the silence didn't just mean no talking but no telly, no internet, no texting. I found myself having quite a yearning for silence whenever I was watching the programme. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that the place where they spent an 8 day silent retreat was in the middle of the sticks, so large parts of the series were shots of beautiful countryside with nothing but the sound of birds mucking about and having a little singsong whilst they did it, and the sight of sheep silently judging cows. There's a definite desire in me to connect with all things nature, living, as I do, in a big block of flats that looks out onto another block of flats in a none too visually pleasing bit of town. It feels much more like reality than using Facebook statuses to try and impress people/earn people's approval/affirm my own insecurities with whatever inconsequential opinion I've got or smug middle class avocation I've done that day. Trees have been here a lot longer than I have, and they'll be around a lot longer too; it can help me remember my place in the universe. I don't mean that in a take-me-down-a-peg-or-two-because-you're-nothing kind of way; quite the opposite. Every bit of nature, no matter how small or big or enduring or fleeting, is utterly glorious in its own way, and that means we all are too. And so it can be good to be constantly in the presence of something that reminds that I'm insignificant and tiny on the one hand and oddly effulgent on the other.

Of course, regularly entering into silence isn't always that easy, or desirable. While it can be friendly and mystical, it can also be scary and boring too, and it's usually scary and boring way before friendly and mystical get their turn. Thinking about it, it's pretty much only the potential scariness of it that puts me off doing it. Even the possibility of boredom is a fear. I'm not scared that I'll be bored; I was bored of the first couple of weeks of the World Cup but that didn't mean I lay awake at night in a cold sweat at the prospect of Brazil v North Korea not being the most enthralling of games. Nope, I'm scared that if I'm bored then it'll mean I'm a deeply, irredeemably boring person and if only I could go on facebook to pretend I'm not, no really I'm not, look I have interesting opinions say witty things do interesting stuff with lots of friends, just look at all the likes and comments I've got, clearly a vapid person wouldn't have any of those things.

I'm afraid that I'll get the music from Super Mario Bros. on the Wii stuck in my head on an endless loop. I'm scared, too, that I'll feel lonely. Not just for the time I'm in silence, or that one day I may end up lonely, but that actually, stripped away of all outside influence, I am at my core undeniably lonely, as every single person who has ever lived is lonely, because no-one will ever truly know what anyone else is thinking or feeling or experiencing. I'm also scared that I'll discover that actually I'm a Really Bad Person because I'm capable of doing Really Bad Things, and I don't just mean that I once threw a mug against the wall for no other reason than to break it, I used to pull the legs off daddy long-legs as a kid and I unashamedly own a pair of off-white socks.

It can be hard to trust that, away from the temptation to get my affirmation from how many texts I've had or from people being able to complement me, or to drown out my nagging loneliness and anxieties with having the telly on, I'll journey on past all these things I'm so afraid of and addicted to avoiding, and get to a place where I can begin to see that actually I'm OK, as we all are. And it'll be no surprise to discover there'll be a nice cup of tea waiting there.

The Dutch have no concept of rust

2010-10-26T20:46:00.001+01:00

The other day I realised I remember only a pathetically small amount of my life. I'd be surprised if I were to remember, actually really remember, more than about 0.000000000000003% of my life. As an example, I 'remember' going to the FA Cup final in 2008. I remember a great drive down with Dave Elsom. I remember that Kanu scored. I remember that we won. And I remember that it is one of the greatest days of my life. But then I can't remember any of the things we talked about on the drive down. I don't remember anything about the match, other Kanu doing a crappy stop-start celebration that made me tap Dave on the arm and say I think the goal's been disallowed (it wasn't). I barely remember the actual goal itself.

So what am I actually remembering? Is it what I tell myself is true? I suppose my brain must have decided it's just simply impossible to store everything I ever experienced and so, to save me any bother, subconsciously decided what were the pertinent things to remember, and then ditched the rest. At some point I thought 'That was one of the Greatest Days of My Life' and my brain thought, 'Right, that's all we need to know. Now out with the rest.' If I was to remember any more than that then I couldn't possibly have space to remember song lyrics which I would swear I couldn't possibly recall but then upon hearing a song for the first time in 10 years I'll suddenly find myself able to sing along. If questioned about it I'd have thought it preferable to remember winning the world's greatest domestic cup competition than the lyrics to I'm Free by The Soup Dragons, but if my brain reasons that one day it's possible I may find myself at a party when that song comes on and I'll be most displeased to find I can't impress people by not only dancing in the Madchester style but actually singing along to it, then who am I to argue? My brain belongs to the race of brains that put a man on the moon, so I guess I'd be a fool to dismiss it's reasoning.

I suppose I could have an existentialist crisis about it all but I'd probably only forget I had it.

I think I'll become a decimal point. 'Cause it's got the power to make things look small or big, all at the same time. I want to have such power. Mmmm, power.

2010-10-19T22:01:00.000+01:00

My blogging output recently has been about as prolific as Heskey for England so in an attempt to address that I have, at my wife's suggestion, decided to initiate Blogging Tuesday, when I shall have myself a little go at writing a new post. Even if I don't play, at the very least I'll put some practice in on the training pitch. And if that analogy doesn't make sense then tough, I'm not going to spell it out for you. It's my ball and I'm going to do what I want with it. Anyway, I shall christen Blogging Tuesday with a post about how life is bloody brilliant, which seems a rather fitting topic following my last post. A bit like the pudding following the first course.

Life, I'm jolly pleased to say, is indeed bloody brilliant. Every now and then I have moments where I feel all energised and I want to stand up and shout 'LIFE IS BLOODY BRILLIANT!', to announce it to people, to grab them by the collar and shake them and carry on shouting 'CAN'T YOU SEE?!' And if they were to query why I would point at a cloud and eulogise about its utter, transient brilliance.

When I have these moments I know they're very genuine because they're not based on something lovely having just happened and life has decided to resemble a fluffy puppy that can talk and the first thing it says is 'Tickle my belly and I'll grant you 3 wishes (and I'll not mind if one of those wishes is to indefinitely extend the number of wishes, and just to get you started I've already granted that you will never run out of milk, toothpaste, undies or loo roll. Er, did I mention that my turds magically disappear so there's no need for you to carry around the plastic bag of shame when you take me for walkies?)'.

The last time such a moment happened I was sat on my balcony, reading and sipping, pinky out, a pot of tea. Which admittedly sounds a little bit smugly comfy and middle class, only I was reading Henri Nouwen's Reaching Out, where he was asking how do we respond to the suffering and pain in the world ("There is no hope in denial or avoidance, neither for ourselves nor for anyone else...life can only be born out of the seed planted in crushed soil.") I'd also just been reading from another book that was talking about the addictions and attachments that we have, and of which I know I have many. (If you don't think you do, affix some little bells to your feet, take a walk down the street and say to every person you pass 'I've just done a poo that's 3 feet long. Would you like to meet it? It's called Marjorie the Ironic'. And if you don't want to do that then there's a good chance you're attached to the idea of appearing to be a reasonably sane person.)

So the fact that I wasn't denying the fact that there is so much terrible, horrific stuff in the world meant I knew I was experiencing a genuine gratitude for the proper brilliance of life. If anything, those things can make life all the more precious. I feel at a bit of a loss as to how to explain that adequately, that life is so intrinsically good, even when it has so much that is so unutterably bad. The bad doesn't deny the good. I remember going to a talk at Greenbelt that was something to do with holding the sacred and the profane together. The speaker mentioned a service they did where they projected at the back of the venue 'God is in the shit'. I find that really hopeful, that even when life is at its abject worse there is still some beauty that can still be found, even if that means we need to change our definition of what beauty really is.

People often assume that my life must be pretty hard and wouldn't it be wonderful if I were to be healed. Well yes, it can be pretty hard at times and I'll not deny that I'd love to play football. But to somehow imply that I can only be great once I can stroll to the shop is so miserably hopeless. I know this going to sound pretentiously pseudo-spiritual and if I were you reading this I would want to jab me repeatedly in the temple, but if my happiness is dependent on my freedom then neither will I be truly happy nor free. Anyway, it's only since being ill that I've really begun to appreciate the simple joy of a nice cup of tea, and the transcendent glory of a cloud. I always enjoyed them before of course, but I feel much more humbled by them now. I suppose having an incurable, degenerative neurological condition is a bit of a tough way to learn that lesson, but I'm grateful to be learning it.

I'm making a device that listens to people's minds. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

2010-08-19T20:39:00.000+01:00

Today, I have realised I'm really sodding brilliant. Not (I hope) in an arrogant way, and not (I'm fairly confident) in an utterly deluded way, like X-Factor contestants who are convinced they're the world's greatest undiscovered singing talent and if only Louis Walsh would tell them this.

The reason I'm fairly confident of my utter kick-arseness is that, for a start, it has nothing to do with what I've done or can do, which is just as well as there's no guarantee that any of that stuff is going to last. I've got a 1st class Maths degree, which I suppose is a pretty decent achievement, and has the added bonus that I have, in some small way, got a bit of a head start over most people in seeing how beautiful the world is. But thanks to the MS messing up my think-tank a bit, today at work I was struggling to get my head round the logic of some Excel formulas. I used to be a passable footballer, but that obviously means diddley squat these days. I know a pretty nifty matchstick trick, but that seems a pretty flimsy thing to base my self esteem in. People occasionally say nice things about how I write, but there's a veritable cornucopia of people who write gooder than me, so I'd at best only be able to spend the rest of my life thinking there's a plethora of people more brilliant than me. I could get all cock a hoop about the fact that this month I've had people read my blog from the likes of China, Senegal, Taiwan, Holland and Russia, but going by what people searched for to get to here that just means looking up skirts is a poorly serviced niche in the vast world of on line porn.

I could base my brilliance on being British (I did an on line quiz to see how British you are and I was quite proud when the results told me I'm Bloody British). We are rather spiffing, but we're certainly no more brilliant than anyone else. We're just more quintessentially British than anyone else. I was once jolly pleased with my legs and arse - at Pyjama Jump (which, for those of you who don't know, involved the entire student population of Sheffield dressing up in the nightwear of the opposite sex and then getting hideously inebriated, apart from the Christian Union, who would go round preventing scantily clad, passed-out students from dying of hypothermia, seeing as for some reason it happened during winter) I would wear a tiny little nightie and have plenty of women tell me I had a cracking set of pins. But again, I can't base my wondrousness in that any more as I've got a washboard for a bottom and sticks for legs.

I suppose I could justify some of my brilliance based on what I haven't done. I'm not a paedophile but then that's as much to do with the fact that I wasn't a victim myself so I shouldn't big myself up too much. I've not killed anyone, but then I also drive so I wouldn't rule out that never happening. And while I'm pretty certain that at least I'll not be a serial killer, I'm pretty certain that if I was born in Germany in 1920 I'd have been a complicit Nazi.

And anything to do with personality type generally has Nothing To Do With Me. Nope, while it may be brilliant that I have or haven't done certain arbitrary things, they don't make me brilliant. I am brilliant in the same way that a tree is brilliant. I remember once sitting in a field looking at a tree and realising that the tree was Not Wrong. I couldn't possibly say that it was better than any other tree. There may have been certain things I personally liked about it more than the next tree, but that's just my own preference and not based on any inherent goodness of the tree. The fact was, that tree was brilliant because it was a tree, and that was a Good Thing.

I'd always happily applied that to other people, but it wasn't really until doing the washing up a couple of hours ago that I realised it probably applies to me too. I am brilliant. Not more brilliant than anyone else, just more me than anyone else. Hooray.

You tap-dancing hamsters. You rock my world, with your little blurry feet

2010-07-09T00:23:00.000+01:00

Football football football food football football sleep football football football football work football football food football football football maths football football football football a hedge football football football football...

That's roughly what's been on my mind for the past month. In honour, here are my World Cup awards:

Best Name award: Chile's Waldo Ponce. And Ponce is pronounced 'ponsay', which is just a poncey way of saying ponce.

Best Quote award: 'Kim Jong-il thinks I'm at work', seen on a banner during the Brazil v North Korea game. Runner up: 'The Serbian defence are good at relieving themselves under pressure.' Good to hear that the Serbian players don't have any problems with stage fright when they're at a public urinal.

Most Beautiful Moment award: The North Korean player crying his eyes out with pride during the national anthems before their game with Brazil. Unless he was crying because the North Korean authorities had just told him if they lost then he'd never see his family again, in which case that would win the award for the most tragic moment.

Best Advert: The footy adverts during major tournaments have been pretty crap ever since the classic Brazil airport ad from the 1998 World Cup, but finally adidas have come up trumps.

Best Comedy Moment award: France. Every single moment they were there. Which leads to...

Most Mental award: Raymond Domenech. Because he is a mental.

The Saving Grace award: Adrian Chiles, for making ITV's coverage bearable.

Why Germany Are Better Than England award: they have players who can play like a saggy bottom for their club but they know how to play as a team while we have a few players (not a whole team's worth) who can be great for club level but can't figure out how to play as a team; they're not as afraid as they probably don't have a press who'll crucify them for losing; they probably aren't insecure about their nation having diminishing importance in the world; our best clubs are based on foreign talent...etc etc.

Who's the Most Corrupt at FIFA award: Should it go to president Sepp Blatter, awarding his nephew's firm a £342m hotel exclusivity deal, or vice president Jack Warner, giving his family firm 5400 tickets at the last world cup to sell on the black market for a £500,000 profit? Or maybe just FIFA as a whole, leaving a country where 20 million live on less than £2 a day with a £3billion bill to pay for hosting it while they pocket £2billion without paying a single pence in tax? Still, it's a beautiful game...

The I Never Thought I'd Agree with Hitler award:

Stop the cows. They're licking everything.

2010-06-10T21:35:00.001+01:00

Here is some of my yesterday, recorded for posterity. Not that history will appreciate me recording a few of the events of my June 9th 2010. History needs that about as much as I need to be repeatedly slapped in the face by Rolf Harris endlessly saying 'can you tell what it is yet?'

I had breakfast. A very generic, nondescript cereal. I love breakfast though.

I babysat for my godson. We played Star Wars Lego on the Playstation. He was better than me. I remember the slow, creeping depression I had when England players started to be younger than me. Young people being better than me is going to be increasingly common for the rest of my life.

I had lunch. I don't even remember what it was. I feel mildly aghast and/or sad that I don't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, though really I shouldn't. Give me any date from my life and I'll almost certainly not be able to tell you what I ate. A lot of it will end up as a poo though. If I was to spend too long pondering that all the effort of everybody involved in growing the food, packaging the food (not to mention all the effort of all the people involved in producing the packaging), transporting it, manning the supermarket that sold it, and me in preparing and cooking the food, just ends up in me doing a poo, I'd probably end up having some kind of existentialist breakdown.

I did a poo.

I went to the library to get out a book for Kate. As I waited at the front of the queue for the next available librarian, a man came alongside me saying 'This gentleman appears to be in front of me'. I looked at him in a slightly confused way but said nothing, as clearly nothing needed to be said. He had already said everything that needed to be said. He then said 'Are you in front of me?' I continued to give him a mildly bemused look and replied 'Yes.' Because I obviously was. He then invited me to go ahead of him in the queue. My puzzled look continued because this appeared to be an Englishman who had no understanding of the concept of queueing. He had a moustache.

I had a coffee in a faceless corporate coffee shop. The more corporations try to act like they care by valuing me as an individual, the more soul destroying I find it. Lovely coffee though.

I chuckled lots while listening to Charlie Brooker's panel quiz 'So Wrong It's Right' on iplayer. There was a round called 'This putrid modern hell'. I'd like Charlie to read me bedtime stories.

I watched an episode of Bugs Bunny on Youtube and was surprised to discover that my wife does a better impression of Marvin the Martian than Marvin the Martian himself. That would probably make him very angry.

I didn't get to sleep for a very long time thanks to a very painfully spasming right calf.

And so I successfully navigated another day, a day which brought me one day nearer to the day of my death.

Every time someone votes Conservative, God kills a kitten

2010-05-08T14:52:00.002+01:00

So, we have a new government. Sort of. I've loved following the election campaign, like I loved following the Obama campaign in America, and like I loved following the campaign in the last season of the West Wing, which I think must be what gave me the campaign bug. Of course, our British campaign was a bit different to how they do it across the pond. Over there they actually seem to still have quite a respect for the office of president, but our fine history of satire makes it impossible to do that. Probably one the reasons Clegg did so well in the campaign was that impressionists found him impossible to do, making him fairly immune to a lot of our belittling. Sometimes I find it a bit sad we don't esteem our leaders more, but then I hear joke about Cameron looking like a buttock with eyes and I think I prefer to laugh.

While I don't like the two party system the yanks have, I have a mild envy of the fact that they have two very distinct set of values to choose from (one of the things I've found odd about Obama's drop in his approval ratings is many Americans' surprise at discovering that he dresses to the left). Over here it's mostly just a scramble for the centre ground, except for a bit of big state versus small state between the reds and blues. And that's why I've found it so hard to choose who to vote for. They all had a bunch of policies, some of which I liked the sound of and some of which sounded like poo. Instead we had the new talent show contest of the leaders debates, with all the leaders trying to seduce us like they were on speed dating night, and from which the only clear winner was David Dimbleby. That maybe helped us choose which one we liked, but since when was liking someone any kind of indicator for ability? In interviews James Blunt comes across as a nice bloke, but that has no bearing on the fact that his songs make me want to scratch my ears off and maim puppies until he stops. (Charlie Brooker has a typically acerbic description of the leadershere)

While I've enjoyed listening to all the analysis, I've known that, ultimately, it's all a load of bollocks, just people's opinions without much fact or genuine insight. Whoever gets in will do some things well and they'll balls up some other stuff, and probably the majority of stuff they'll just keep ticking over. And even the stuff those goes well or badly will probably have little to do with whether or not it was a good idea, as there's a million other unforeseeable events that will directly or indirectly affect the results that no-one could have known or done anything about.

As an example, just imagine that one day, Cameron had to do a particularly constipated poo. The extra few minutes he spends straining away on the throne (just picture it your head now...see his eyes bulge...picture a bead a sweat forming on his brow...hear his stifled groan...) means he's a bit late to take an important phone call from the Chinese president, who takes this as some kind of personal affront, decides that Cameron is therefore a nob and pulls out of a trade deal that would have been worth billions to the economy and helps us out of debt. Instead, we lose the money, go bankrupt as a nation, millions lose their jobs but there's no money left to pay them benefits, their homes get repossessed, society breaks down and there's constant rioting, not to mention endless strikes by NHS staff and teachers disgruntled at being paid with signed photos of Cameron's smiling android face instead of money. All because Dave couldn't squeeze out a turd like any normal person with a high fibre diet.

Life is precious. I'm not going to just sit here reading your pathetic dribble

2010-04-20T19:43:00.000+01:00

I dare say regular readers (hi mum) will have noticed the infrequency of new blog posts. It's not like the heyday of blogging a few years ago. Back then blogging was the fashionable way to avoid face-to-face communication. You could bare your soul and post about the inner workings of your mind, all from the comfort of your own home and without having any of the uncomfortable vulnerability of saying it to someone's face. And as the reader you could feel like you were getting to know someone without the annoyance of actually getting to know someone, because if they were annoying you could navigate away and check your emails instead for the 26th time that day.

People's short attention span and their insatiable appetite for perpetual newness meant feeling the pressure to provide regular posts. It was like having to sacrifice regular offerings to the great deity of blog readership that all bloggers were slaves to, lest the readers went and found another blog to go and burp up comments on. So I would post up at least weekly, even if it was any old drivel. Now that I don't post as often, I feel like I should post something a bit more worthy. A post about how I saw a fence that day might have been OK when there'd be new post a few days later, but when it's your only post for a month, it doesn't really seem worth the effort. Instead, I feel like I should say something profound about how the fence says something about the human condition. Though in reality, when I saw the fence all I probably thought about was all the different ways I'd like to demolish the slatty bastard.

Of course, it goes to show how vain I am. When I had regular readers and people often commented, I made sure I regularly posted. It was always nice to get comments; it massaged the ego. I'd say I blogged for the sheer joy of writing, and a lot of the time that was true. But the reality is that I'm human and a big motivator was to get attention and complements. Now I just try and come up with witty status updates on Facebook in the hope that people will press the 'like' button. I suppose now no-one reads blogs I can get back to the purity of writing for its own sake. Sadly the winning combination of my propensity to indolence and the fact that the inner workings of my mind are about as insipid as a Sunday in Swindon don't really make for the most riveting of blogs.

Don't say anything. Why don't you put it in an email, then I can ignore it at my pleasure.

2010-03-21T21:29:00.002Z

Ever since I was a nipper when I used to throw stones at the cats that strayed into our garden, I've always loved nature. I would feel a sense of both peace and adventure when I was hugging a tree, scrambling over rocks and exploring woods. Sadly not all of nature has heard of the Disability Discrimination Act and there's no such things as a wheelchair friendly rock to climb up. It's meant I've had to find new ways to commune with the creation, so praise be for clouds.

I've developed quite a love for them over the last few years. Whenever I look out of the window now, the first thing I do is turn my eyes heavenward to see if there are any floating genially by which, this being England, there almost always is. Then, if I can, I'll sit for a few minutes and contemplate their beauty or have fun spotting shapes in their formations (there's almost always an elephant and quite often Great Britain too, as if that cloud is some kind of mirror, far away).

People always moan about an overcast sky but I think a clear, cloudless sky is almost just as depressing. It's just featureless and boring. Like Lincolnshire. I want hills on my landscape, and I want hills in my sky too.

I often wonder about what it is I love so much about clouds. A lot of it is to do with their transcendence, the fact that they are always above us, drawing our eyes to look up, inviting us out of ourselves, reminding us that our individual existence is not all there is but that there is a whole world out there. We're a narcissistic bunch, us humans, and we can get caught up in our own self importance, worrying about out iphones and share prices and what washing powder should I buy and will people judge me for not having the right shoes. Clouds remind us that actually, we're pretty insignificant.

They don't do it contemptuously though. They're very generous and selfless with their beauty. We often run around unaware of anything outside of ourselves, certainly unaware of the ephemeral but perpetual glory above our heads, but clouds will never cease being wondrous, ready to share their loveliness with anyone who'll take the time to stop and look up. They're very egalitarian on that front too, a great leveller of people. Being rich won't make any difference; you don't get nicer clouds above the posh suburbs than you do above inner city slums.

I love their infiniteness too. You could travel around the world and view an ever changing cloudscape. Then when you get back to where you started they'll be different to when you set off, and so you can keep on going. I think the variations of cumulus clouds are my favourites. They're the ones I most want to reach out and touch. I always loved climbing over rocks, but climbing a cumulonimbus would be much more adventurous fun, not least because falling off a rock would result in a bloody, offal-y mess. Fall down a cumulonimbus and I can only imagine you would gently bounce down (in slow motion, like watching astronauts running on the moon), and when you come to a comfy rest at the bottom you could reach out, take a handful, and eat it, and it would taste of vanilla and be warm and wonderful.

Try this one for starters, and dream.

You're right, elephants in thongs is not something you see every day. Enjoy it.

2010-02-25T18:53:00.003Z

So the whole assisted suicide debate has reared its cheerfully macabre head again, a bit like the grim reaper dressed as a clown. It's amde all the more pertinent by the fact that Debbie Purdey has MS. I've only ever thought about it in a fairly abstract way - call me a chicken but I'm not overly keen to think about whether or not I'd kill myself, or how far the disease would have to progress before I'd want to go and breathe some clean, invigorating alpine air before topping myself. So instead here's my tuppence worth of opinion on the whole thing. The media's about 48.7% full of the pointless hot air of people's opinions on things they know nothing about, but I think I'm probably a bit more qualified to talk about it than most. So there.

At its most basic level, I think people with illness or injury should have the legal right to kill themselves. We've already had to deal with the loss of so much of what most people take for granted, so I don't have much time for anybody who's never suffered much who stands there claiming that it should be outlawed, armed with nothing more than the glib argument that life is precious.

Having said that, life is incredibly precious and I'm uncomfortable with the message that can be sent out by euthanasia. People are already afraid enough of suffering as it is, and the disabled are already on the margins. If it becomes the norm then the rest of society needn't bother sharing life with those with disabilities - they can just go and top themselves when it gets a bit too much and we don't need to bother making any sacrifices to include them.

Rather than saying you're not allowed to die, what we really need to be doing is helping people live a meaningful life. We all have limitations regardless of our physical abilities, but whatever those limitations are we all have something to offer. Recognising that is, I reckon, a better way to demonstrate that life is precious, rather than getting caught up in legal quibbles.

There was a lady with spina bifida talking about it on PM the other day on Radio 4 - you can have a listen here. It starts about 7 minutes in.

And on a similar theme, this talk here, by double amputee Aimee Mullins, is excellent. Probably the most worthwhile 21 minutes and 58 seconds you'll watch today.

My badger's gonna unleash hell on your arse. Badgertastic.

2010-02-10T14:57:00.003Z

Hello petal.

Whilst you're feeling all warm and fuzzy from being called a pet name by someone with whom there's a 99.9999999999999199999% chance you've never been particularly intimate with, I feel like I should now point out that you're identity is probably all messed up. I was thinking this as I sat on the tram the other day. Say you get your identity from being good looking. That has practically nothing to do with you - it's some lucky coincidence of the combination of your mum and dad's genes. Or say you're great at sport. Again, you got lucky that your body (which you had no control over) happened to grow in such a way that it turns out you can kick a ball harder or your lungs happen to have the capacity to enable you run faster for longer. And then there's the fact that you just so happened to have the right opportunities that firstly helped you discover you could hit a tennis ball quite well, and then secondly enabled you to develop that skill (thanks to the fact your coach, who through no fault of yours, happened to not be an incompetent twerp).

We assume if an individual is successful (or, inversely, if some poor sod ends in the proverbial gutter) then they deserve it because they're brilliant (or rubbish), and their fate was inevitable. You'll be disappointed (or pleased, depending on where you are on the food chain) to discover that it's mostly by chance. I know, because clever people have proved it. Clever people who have Masters and Doctorates and certificates on their wall to prove they are more cleverer and better and deserving than you or me (see what I did there? I was all ironic and stuff).

If you're wanting evidence of this, take the example of Bill Gates who, thanks to coming up with an operating system that wasn't as good as Apple's, became the richest man in the world for 7 years and if that wasn't enough, also became Lucifer himself. Anyway, it turns out it was a bit of a fluke that that happened, thanks to the confluence of a few factors outside of his control. We tend to be sheep and follow everyone else, so if a product takes a lead over the competition, even if that was by chance, we assume it's inherently better. In one experiment, some people were split into several groups and were able to download songs by unknown artists. Each group could see the number of downloads for each song in their group only. If the songs had an intrinsic quality, then a deterministic view of the world would mean that the same songs would roughly be equally popular across each group. The results were actually pretty random.

In another experiment, a group had to listen to two people (let's call them Geoff and Marjorie the Indifferent) work on a task together. Unbeknown to the group, they were listening to a script in which the two workers had equal input. The group was told one of the workers was randomly chosen to be paid. When the group was told it was Geoff that was paid, the vast majority rated him better; when it was Marjorie the Indifferent that was paid, she was rated much better, even though the groups knew the payment was random.

Another experiment got two people to work together, for which they were told they would be paid differing amounts, but who got more would be decided at random. Generally the people got on well when they didn't know who was paid the most. When that information was made available though, the person who got paid more had more resistance to the input of their lower paid colleague.

Social psychologist Melvin Lerner commented that 'few people would engage in extended activity if they believed that there were a random connection between what they did and the rewards they received', and so 'for the sake of their own sanity' people overestimate how much someone's success can tell us about their ability and identity.

It's possible the randomness of it all may mean you want to sink into an existentialist quagmire and think sod it, there's nothing for it but to spend the rest of your days punching kittens in the face. But I should point out that you're still good and beautiful and worthy. I watched a brilliant little documentary on BBC4 the other day (the TV channel of choice in heaven) that was all about chaos theory and, while everything in the world is random and unpredictable, it's still capable of producing pattern and order and, ultimately, beauty. Like you. But not cats. They should still be punched in the face.

You're not so much a closed book, more a hidden pamphlet

2009-12-31T15:40:00.008Z

Like a particularly unwelcome, recurring case of fungal nail infection, it's my annual awards. Let us rejoice.

-The 'Who Thought Something Could Be Profound and Boring All At the Same Time' award: seeing Waiting for Godot, with two of our finest thesps Ian Mckellen and Patrick Stewart. Confusing and dull, with a vague sense that underneath it all you know that something deep is happening. It's like drinking nettle tea. Beneath the odd smell and taste, at some mysterious level, my body knows it's very good for me.

-'Best Eyebrows' award: Some random stylish chap at the Mark Watson stand-up show we saw. During the interval we were encouraged to pay a respectful complement to a stranger. Mine was to a man with very fetching eyebrows. He also had quite a nice bottom, though I decided he may find that a little uncomfortable. Anyway, it turned out my complement was agreed to be the best complement by the rest of the audience, thus winning me the contents of Mark's pocket (which it turned out to be three english pounds. I frittered it away on meaningless tat).

-The 'Power to the People' award: corporate eco pranksters The Yes Men, whose film The Yes Men Fix the World we saw the premiere of, complete with Q&A with the Yes Men themselves. They do things like like pretend to represent Dow Chemicals, responsible for the Bhopal disaster, go on BBC World with an audience of 300 million, admit responsibility and and pledge several billion dollars in compensation, thus wiping off 2% of the value of the company in just 20 minutes. You can see the trailer here.

-The 'Properly Mental' award: the brain. Honestly, it's mental. Go to TED.com and search 'brain' then watch the results.

-'Best New Friend' award part 1: Clouds. Clouds are brilliant. Stop reading this, go outside or go to your window and look outside. Or if it's dark look at this. Beautiful.

-'Best New Friend' award part 2: Monkeys. One day our simian overlords will come in power, and what will rejoicing there will be on that great and glorious day. For my birthday treat I went to Monkey Forest to pay them tribute. Here is one of them:

-'So Long Faithful Friend' part 1: Flat 17 Columbia Place. 5 years we lived together, which isn't just the second longest I've lived anywhere, it was also a very eventful 5 years with some real lows (the darkest night of my soul) and highs (getting hitched), and the flat was perfect for all of it.

-'So Long Faithful Friend' part 2 (possibly): Portsmouth FC, 1898-2010(?). RIP. Being a Pompey fan has been just as eventful, from having our own fans sing 'you've got a condom on your head' to the tune of 'he's go the whole world in his hands' at me on a freezing, soaking afternoon in Barnsley, to seeing us lift the FA Cup. And now, thanks to some typically idiotic behaviour from our owners, the club is teetering on the brink. Imbeciles.

-The 'I Used to Think I Needed to Save Babies from Burning Buildings or to Climb Everest To Feel Like a Man But It Turns Out It Would Only Take a Few Months of Doing Nothing' award: Having a beard. Grrr. If you don't have a beard, you're probably thinking 'I wish I had a beard. I wonder what it's like?'. Well I can tell you: it's pretty flipping great.

-The 'Er, Crap, How Did That Happen?' award: the passing of a decade. 10 years ago I used to have curtains. We'd never heard of chavs or reality TV or credit crunches or put 'i-' in front of anything to make it sound all futuristic and hardly any of us had mobile phones and to google wasn't a verb.

I suppose I could do some awards for the past decade, but I have no memory. Probably the most noteworthy things were I got MS, I got married and Pompey won the FA Cup. So in the great competition of Rubbish versus Jolly Lovely, it's 2-1 to me. And I'll settle for that.

you're just a bin liner full of yoghurt

2009-12-18T23:15:00.005Z

Gosh, it's been a long time since I blogged. What better reason could there be for a new post than that annual travesty of self-congratulatory, ego-aggrandising backslapping that purports to be about keeping in touch but is really about scoring points in the great competition that is all human social interaction: the round robin Christmas newsletter. Here is mine:

Some stuff happened this year. Some of it was quite nice (e.g I had several cups of tea), some a bit rubbish (e.g I cut myself on something a bit sharp and said a cuss word). On reflection though, most things weren't really either good or bad, they were just things (e.g I once looked at a hedge).

As a result of these things, or merely concurrent to these things happening, I also felt things. That is, felt in an emotional sense, as opposed to feeling a physical object, like when your hand accidentally brushes against the bottom of somebody of the opposite sex through no fault of your own, resulting in you having an internal monologue of wondering if you should say something to convince them you're not a serial groper but then thinking maybe they didn't notice, it was only a very slight brush after all, and saying something might just result in mutual embarrassment (this may have happened this year. I don't remember). There's probably several words to describe the range of emotions I felt this year, like in the way Inuits have a veritable smorgasborg of words for snow. But I am an Englishman, for whom we only need one word for snow (i.e snow), and similarly my plethora of emotions this year can easily be whittled down into just a couple. The two I will pick are 'happy' and...wait for it...'sad'.

I've also had several thoughts this year, though to be honest, not many, and they're certainly never going to change the world. The vast majority were along the lines of 'Why did I just go into this room? I can't remember. I think I will now leave this room.'

So all in all, it has been a year.

his flatulence was guilty of a certain level of circumlocution

2009-10-19T19:17:00.004+01:00

I started reading a book earlier, something about getting in touch with your longings and dreams and actually going after them. It's not something I'm especially good at. I rarely know what I want beyond a nice cup of tea and a sit down, and even if I do know what I want I have a tendency to play it safe - 'better to have never have loved than to have loved and lost' roughly sums up my world view. I don't like to step out in case I fail; I don't want to risk in case it hurts; why risk letting my dreams be dashed and my longings go unfulfilled? Life will only let you down and hurt you. Like being brought a cup of tea and you begin to let the anticipation rise up within you, eagerly awaiting the moment when the hot brew passes your lips and you wonder again at how some dried leaves steeped for a few minutes in hot water and then finished off with a bit of milk could possibly bring you to within a hair's width of heaven, but then you taste it and discover that somebody put two sugars in it, and suddenly you're cursing the day your mother gave you birth into this God-forsaken world.

It's not an approach to life I'm happy with. But I don't want to simply start believing that things won't inevitably fail, not least because that's not actually true and I'd just be deluding myself, living in denial. Crappy things simply do happen, no matter how many sermons I hear about how God wants everything to be lovely (it's strangely comforting to know that possibly the first book of the bible to have been written, Job, is all about things going a wee bit squiffy). No, I'd rather come to a place where I value the falling over and grazing my knee. It's like leaving the house. I may not want to leave the house in case it rains and I'll get cold and wet. It would be naive of me to say, well, it hardly ever rains so more often than not things will turn out peachy. Then, when it does rain I'll just moan a bit. Instead, I want to savour and appreciate the good stuff about rain. For a start it washes away dog turd on the pavement. It's also the reason why England is the green and pleasant land that it is. We Brits like to grumble about it but without the rain things wouldn't be half as pretty.

This got me on to thinking about how we have to tendency to think that all pain is bad and to be avoided or killed. I wonder what effect pain killers have had on our society's psyche. We seem to be having an increasingly unhealthy relationship with pain, and are forgetting that it's a vital communicator. The pain you get when you touch a hot pan with your bare hand isn't bad. Yet when we get a headache our first response is to reach for the paracetamol, not to think maybe I should stop staring at a computer screen or get my eyes tested or stop having 10 cups of coffee a day. The same for a spot of backache, when maybe all that's needed is to sit up properly or deal properly with stress at work. If pain was a person it's motto would be 'don't shoot the messenger'. Sometimes we need to listen to it, not tell it to shut up.

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that I'd like to dare to dream.

i suspect i may have a crapulous backside

2009-09-18T20:41:00.004+01:00

Funk is, as everybody knows, one of history's great musical inventions. I say invention, but I guess it was more of a discovery, as it's one of those things that's such a part of who God is that it simply is. Like Maths. So it's a shame that to be in a funk means to feel decidedly uncheery, which is how I've been feeling the last few days. I've had about as much hope as you'd expect from a Pompey supporter at this point of the season, given my general prospects for things like getting a job that I actually enjoy and pays a decent amount of money, as well as a plethora of other things. I've felt trapped by circumstance and not seen a way out, or had any reason to think that things would change. Normally I'd have a nice cup of tea and some chocolate hobnobs to comfort me, only I'm diabetic so I can't do that as it'll probably mean going blind and having my feet amputated.

Of course, I need to remember how much I've got to be thankful for. Most people in the world have no choice about what kind of job they can get, so it's a luxury to even contemplate having a job that might be in any way enjoyable. And it was a bit rich of me to feel crap about my circumstance, while wheeling down the street in my free wheelchair knowing full well that no car would explode within about a thousand mile radius (or however far away Baghdad is) to catch a free tram to go and buy a t-shirt I didn't actually need.

Then I had a really good natter with Kate tonight, which helped remind me of stuff. The main thing was remembering why God led the Hebrews through the desert after they left Egypt, namely so that they would learn to depend on God, otherwise they would think they would have achieved for themselves all the lovely stuff in the promised land. I realised that probably part of the reason why they kept on the move in the desert was so that they couldn't put down roots and try and build for themselves their own little kingdoms, or be able to become farmers and thus fend for themselves; they had no choice but to depend on God to provide for them every day and not be able to build up any savings to fall back on.

And so a lot of what I've really been wanting is to have my own mini kingdom, the kind of aspirational life we're led to believe is our right from the telly - nice job, nice house, able to do whatever you want whenever you want. The only reason dying to self hurts is because my identity or security or hopes are in the wrong thing. I've been wanting to be self sufficient and it hurts that I can't be. So I need to surrender to the fact that I can't build myself a life and trust that God knows what's best. Which is probably for the best. Whatever I could make of my life would probably turn out pretty cack. Like attempting to make some nice digestive biscuits but what came out od the oven were some garibaldi's.

he had a voluptuary arse

2009-09-06T00:50:00.003+01:00

I watched this brilliant little video here about cymatics, a process of making sound waves visible. For example, if you get a plate of metal with some sand on it and subject it to sound waves, the vibrations will produce some beautiful patterns. That in itself can be jolly lovely to look at, and it can have some fascinating applications, like discovering a lexicon for dolphins from their clicks and whistles. The bit I found really interesting though was when he talked about the big bang, speculating as to how loud that must have been and maybe in some way we're shaped by the vibrations of that.

Ooh, I find that concept terribly exciting. The Genesis story of creation says that God spoke and things came into being. So maybe God spoke, and in some mental mystical way the vibrations of his voice formed the shape of all things. So if God is still speaking, then what does that say for evolution, or the shape of our lives? I never really understood the bit where it says God made us in his image. I guessed it was probably meant something like God has an opposable thumb and we have emotions a bit like him and we desire cups of tea because he does. But maybe we're made in his image because we're the visible shape produced by the sound waves of his voice. And that is a beautiful thought.

Your face is just a furbelow

2009-08-19T23:06:00.002+01:00

I had an email from someone the other day saying they were writing a book about spirituality-type stuff. There was to be a chapter about following God when crap happened and she wanted a few people to give their experience, so she wondered if I'd be interested, to which I gladly agreed. The book will inevitably contain a hugely edited version of what I wrote, but below is the full whammy, you lucky sods.

"In early 2003 I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I didn’t know much about it then other than that it was probably a Bad Thing, but we’d started to have a lot of teaching on physical healing at our church so I thought it would only be a prayer meeting or two until I got healed. I only had a couple mild symptoms at the time and I certainly didn’t think the illness would progress that much – that would be a Really Bad Thing, and I’d spent my whole life thinking that Really Bad Things only ever happen to Other People. God would never let me get very ill, or so I thought. But my health deteriorated, new symptoms came along and I now use a wheelchair, so I’ve had to question what I thought I believed.

We’ve probably all heard talks about Moses’ 40 years in the desert or Joseph being sold into slavery and wrongly imprisoned before they could be used by God and fulfilled their purpose. I would tell myself that they went through those kinds of experiences so I wouldn’t have to – they had to experience the desert in order to learn to die to self and depend on God. But now we can learn those lessons just by hearing a sermon and having it stored in our head what the theory and process is. However, head knowledge rarely transforms the heart as much as actual experience. Paul talks about having fellowship with Christ’s sufferings, and that’s not something you can really have without getting in touch with your own suffering.

When I was at my absolute lowest with the MS – effectively paralysed from the waist down, subject to overwhelming fatigue, in pain and, worst of all, feeling abandoned by God, people would say to me God knew how I felt. I know they meant well, but it didn’t help me. If anything it made me more angry with God. I wanted to give up on him, because I thought he’d given up on me and let me down. This wasn’t what I’d been led to expect from God – this caring Father who could perform miracles and overcome any problem with ease. I’ve heard lots about how prosperity gospel isn’t the true gospel, but I sometimes wonder if it’s been replaced with something more subtle and harder to argue against, namely that God wants us living in the Promised Land right now, where we’re fully healed and living in abundant fruitfulness and the fullness of every promise; this is our God-given right, and any kind of wilderness experience is to be prayed against. Expecting this is partly why I wanted to give up on God. The reason I didn’t was, while people told me God knew how I felt, I kept getting a voice in my head saying simply, ‘Now you know how I felt’. I had no answer to that.

I mentioned above the kinds of sermons we’ve heard about bible characters coming through the wilderness before they fulfilled their purpose. This language betrays one of the hidden assumptions we sometimes have, that it’s not until we’re out of the desert that God can use us or that we can really experience him. Yet as Julian of Norwich said, ‘First the fall, then the recovery from the fall. And both are the mercy of God.’ The desert experience is just as much the mercy of God as any time of fruitfulness. God was in the desert leading the Israelites so that they would become dependent on him. In Song of Songs, the beloved learns to lean on her lover by coming through the wilderness. Passages like this imply that even God knows that, as great as our church services and conferences may be, only so much transformation can happen without going through the wilderness. I want to be a lover of God who leans on him, but in Song of Songs it’s not being intimate with God in his chamber or being fed by him under the apple tree that causes us to lean on him. It’s by journeying with him through the wilderness.

The bible is full of the importance of the desert. Dying is a constant theme. This isn’t the kind of ‘Good News’ people want to hear, especially in the affluent West. As Richard Rohr says in Everything Belongs,

“How do you make attractive that which is not?
How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability and non-success?
How do you talk descent when everything is about ascent?
How can you possibly market letting go in a capitalist culture?
How do you present Jesus to a Promethean mind?
How do you talk dying to a church trying to be perfect?”

The Promised Land may be where we’re heading, but the fact is we’re not all there yet. While it may be promised, simply saying we ‘should’ be there is not enough. How do we live in the ‘not yet’? How do we respond to those who are living in the ‘not yet’? Being told God wants me well hasn’t had much lasting effect on my faith. What has helped me more is learning to find God in the right now, regardless of my circumstance.

There are three key things that have helped me to keep going through hardship. One of the main ones is the least spiritual sounding, which is simply that life goes on. The film Touching the Void really helped me with this. It’s an incredible true story about a mountaineer left for dead on the side of a mountain who manages to crawl back to his camp, despite having one leg shattered. It’s amazing that he managed to keep going. Yet, what else was he to do? He could have waited to die but that would have taken a couple of days at least, so he might as well have done something. Similarly, people have said to me it’s amazing I manage to keep going with God, yet what else am I supposed to do? I tried giving up on God but it didn’t get me anywhere. And time goes on.

Another thing that’s slowly been transforming me recently is simply to say to God that I surrender to the desert. I never really want to, but if that’s where I am then wishing I were somewhere else will only make me more unhappy. As I write this I’m having a relapse and I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for myself, but then I read a blessing that said ‘Where you are (however unchosen) is the place of blessing; how you are (however broken) is the place of grace’, and it reminded me that this can be another opportunity for God to work for my good. The Psalms say ‘Be still and know that I am God’, but a more accurate translation would be ‘Give up and know that I am God’. So I simply lie on the floor and I say yes to His path, His death, His will, His leading, His stripping away, and yes to the journey that never ends.

The third thing that’s helping me find life is tapping into the rich history of spirituality that Protestantism has largely forgotten since the Reformation. The desert fathers, the mystics, the monastic traditions all had a greater appreciation of the value of seeking God in the desert, and finding God in the here and now. Rather than seeing God as being ‘over there’, in the Promised Land, in the future, he’s the God who can speak through looking at a cloud or doing the washing up or simply breathing. My wife has been journeying with this far longer than I have, and something we do is to ask what’s brought us life/energy/consolation, and where there’s been death/lack of energy/desolation. This helps us recognise where God’s been in our days so that we can then get better at choosing life, as Moses encouraged Israel to do.

I certainly wouldn’t be choosing to engage with this if I wasn’t ill. Why would I? I know in my head that my identity is as a child of God, but I’d get more worth than I’d care to admit from my ministry or appearance or job or possessions or abilities. I still do but I’m slowly starting to see that maybe I can be free of these things, things that are going to pass away anyway. Paul getting his identity and security from God was probably part of his learning the secret of being content, regardless of how much he had. The desert gives us an opportunity to have what’s false stripped away and for us to journey deep into who God is and who we truly are in him. I’m not suggesting that God causes people to be ill or to suffer; only that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.

When we experience pain and loss in ourselves as well as those around us, do we live in denial and disengage, ignoring it, or do we allow it to challenge, transform and deepen our faith? Jonathan Sacks wrote, “Faith is born not in the answer but in the question; not in harmony but in dissonance”. I’ve heard disabled people say they’re not disabled; it’s society that disables them. The Greek word most commonly translated as ‘heal’ also means ‘to serve or attend to’. How can we enable, serve and attend to those in a state of dis-ease? Do we eagerly pray for people in hardship at first, only to drift away when nothing changes? Or do we process with them, with God and in ourselves all the possible stages of grief and the feelings that come up? After all, James says true religion is to stand with the widow and the orphan in their distress – not giving glib answers, not solving the problem. Just sitting with people in their pain, allowing them to share the gift of their lives and experiences, finding God in the silence. Because when two people are gathered in his name, Jesus, that man of many sorrows, is there."

Your beard is woven of heartache

2009-07-26T17:18:00.002+01:00

The other day I read the heartening news that we're all more loaded than we think. Generally people want to be rich because they think it'll make them happy. So if you discovered you'd just won 857,028 of our English pounds, you'd probably think you'd be pretty damn chuffed and about as happy as a dung beetle that's happened across an especially large turd to have a roll around in. And if you're feeling the teeniest bit despondent that you've never been quite so fortunate, then fret not and imagine if you've ever found yourself in a similar situation to this:

You're on holiday with someone with whom you're in a stable relationship. One evening you settle in with a good book which features a particularly amusing bit that makes you laugh out loud, before heading to bed where you make sweet love with your spouse. Upon waking in the morning, you thank the make for your good health then switch on your phone to discover a text message from someone saying they love you.

If that's ever happened to you, or any element of it, then you're well on your way to virtually being a millionaire. Researchers have helpfully polled a thousand Brits on the happiness inspired by significant life events and compared it with the happiness brought on by lottery wins, meaning they can tell you just how much reading a book is worth in terms of your personal pleasure. Which in this case is £53,660.

Going on holiday is worth £91,759 on the happiness scale. Making love is worth a healthy £105,210, but is trumped by being in a stable relationship, worth £154,849. But even that's not worth as much as hearing someone say 'I love you', worth a cheery £163,424 on the happiness scale.

Laughing regularly is as good as winning £108,021 (though you might be better off not getting your laughs from a sitcom, as apparently the typical emotional state while watching one is mild depression). The real biggy in the happiness stakes is good health, worth a healthy £180,105. So the next time you're feeling a bit broke and aren't sure what to get someone for their birthday, try telling them you love them. Chances are it'll make them happier than some non-essential product of consumerism.

you have no concept of rust

2009-07-15T10:43:00.003+01:00

A couple thoughts, one on beauty and one on salvation, and then another thought that's not mine.

As I sat yesterday in my lounge looking at one our Ikea dining chairs, I got on to thinking about the nature of beauty. It's quite a pleasing set of dining chairs we've got, based on a design classic that any number of companies make. I was wondering how much my appreciation of the chair was based on any inherent pulchritude, and how much was based on the fact that it is quite a popular design and I'm actually just a sheep, believing whatever I'm told by the powers that be. I mean, chances are people probably won't think much of it in a couple hundred years time. in the same way that we don't go crazy for elizabethan furniture design. Is there really such a thing as timeless beauty? It seems to me when people describe a design as timeless, what they really mean is 1950s.

But then, throughout history we've found nature captivating. Regardless of the fashions of the age, we've always appreciated a sunset replete with crepuscular glory, never complained about a rainbow. So what's the difference? It's probably partly because we don't have any choice with nature. I listened to a TED.com talk a while ago about choice. It said studies have shown if we buy something and have the option to take it back and swap it, we're less likely to enjoy it than if we had no option to change it. When we're stuck with something our brains get on with the job of learning to love it. No wonder marriages these days often don't last long, what with quickie divorces opening up the chance to upgrade to a better model. With design and fashion, things constantly change. Usually when I say I don't like anything anymore what I really mean is it's out of date. Mountains may age but they never date. We have no choice but to find hamsters cute and adorable, because we can't take it back and swap it for something else that might have occurred on that evolutionary branch.

Now here's a single thought on salvation. Or, to be more precise, my salvation. I've just finished reading The Last Word and The Word After That by Brian Mclaren, all about the toasty warm subject of hell. It mentioned CS Lewis' The Great Divorce, and how if all you were interested in was your success and was jealous of others blessings then heaven would in fact be hell. I've never really thought much about other people in heaven. I only tend to think of it in terms of going cloud spotting with God. But that made me think, I do tend to get a bit envious of other's success. So my single thought is, maybe I'm not quite as saved as I thought I was.

And here's a thought from cuddly Charlie Brooker, from a typically entertaining article about the breakdown of society:
"As the very fabric of life breaks down around us, even language itself seems unreliable. These words don't make sense. The vowels and consonants you're hearing in your mind's ear right now are being generated by mere squiggles on a page or screen. Pointless hieroglyphics. Shapes. You're staring at shapes and hearing them in your head. When you see the word "trust", can you even trust that? Why? It's just shapes!"

Don't point that beard at me, it might go off.

2009-07-01T14:06:00.002+01:00

As I write this I'd like to say I was enjoying a nice day off, but there appears to be a bit of a heatwave going on and a few extra degrees means I can hardly walk. Still, it's Wimbledon and Federer's playing (swoon) with Murray (mardy) up next and it's not like being able to jog on the spot would enhance the sapidity.

I've been into town and Meadowhell a few times recently as I needed a couple bits of clothing (needed in the way that ducks might need a duck island). I'm not someone who's ever gone shopping much, my parents instilling me with a healthy sense of austerity. But I still used to go into town quite a lot, probably more than anything because I work in town and when you've got an hour's lunch break to kill you often end up having a stroll around. Nearly 3 years out of work obviously put a stop to that, and now I'm back at work I still don't do it given that I don't take a lunch break and there's a soddingly steep hill in the way. But that all means when I do go in it's so much more of a contrast, seeing what it's like. It's like with the Harry Potter kids - we've seen them grow up without noticing it, but see a picture of them from the first film and it's startling how little they all were. So not having been immersed in it for so long means when I do go to some mecca to consumerism it's all the more salient just how vacuous it all is, how we spend so much of our time working jobs we don't like just to be able to afford to buy bigger and bigger houses as we need more space to fit in all the stuff we don't really need. Instead, why not go sit in a room in total silence for 15 minutes and think about why you're so uncomfortable with the absence of any noise and action. Or maybe go look at some clouds.

the stomach - scenic gateway to the bowel

2009-06-18T17:09:00.000+01:00

Here's a veritable smorgasborg of links of stuff I like.

TED is my new favouritest website - a bit like a thinking man's youtube, it gives you a greater appreciation for how amazing everything is. Each talk is usually no more than 20 minutes, and is helpfully tagged by users so you can get a good idea if you think it's going to be any good. For starters, here's why you're not as in control of your decisions as you thought and how ladies crochet and coral reefs can be cleverer than leading mathematicians

One of my favourite people at the moment is Charlie Brooker, The Guardian's very caustic TV critic. He seems like an angry man at first, but it's never without good cause, and I think he's just a big softy at heart. Plus he cracks me up. I'd like him to read me bedtime stories.

I've blogged before about why I love terrace humour, the way it can be base yet also clever and witty at the same time. Football, how I miss thee.

For fans of The Apprentice but don't mind a bit of rudeness, this made me a chuckle.

Oh, and grow a beard. Go on, I dare you.

my dog thinks he's papal

2009-06-02T16:02:00.003+01:00

It's a merry lark, this whole dying to self thing. And by 'merry lark' I mean 'often painful'. It's mostly only painful though because our identity's in the wrong stuff - stuff that's often transient and, in the grand scheme of things, worth about as much as a baboon's fart. If we got our worth from the fact that maybe God doesn't find the idea of spending time with us about as appealing as, I dunno, drinking some cack or something, but actually there's few things in the world he'd enjoy more than to have a nice cup of tea & a sit down with us, then it's a fair bet we'd cope better with whatever life throws at us and happily share the gift of who we are and what we've got with people instead of comparing them, competing with them and generally wanting them to think we're about as brilliant as, I dunno, God or something. Which we're not, which is kind of ironic because God almost thinks we are, given that he wants us to be his kids and/or wife, depending on which bit of God you think about.

So recently I'd been feeling a bit morose as my legs have been getting quite weak. Standing and walking's been harder, which then inevitably brings up fears of what the future holds. I'd gotten used to the level of ability I had, helped by the fact in many respects I can live a fairly 'normal' life - I can walk enough to be able to go to people's houses and get upstairs to the loo if needed; I can wheel to the shop or into town; I can drive and work a bit. The idea of getting worse means potentially losing those things, and that's an idea that's terribly vexing. So I started telling God I surrender to the desert - I'm in it, and moaning about it or denying it isn't going to change that. I might as well say yes to the perpetual invitation to let wherever we find ourselves change us for the better. My identity isn't, after all, as someone who can walk 50 yards; it's as God's own. I've in no way got it of course, but hopefully one day I'll take one tiny step towards my real self.

i've got a goat. i like to dress it up as danny devito and laugh at it

2009-05-19T14:18:00.003+01:00

Sorry I've not blogged for a while. I've been in a mood with you. I dreamt my blog readership was a flock of birds & you all pooed on me. I've forgiven you now though.

For the Make Believe course I'm doing I just handed in my first assignment. We had to do a creative piece that defined our worldview, accompanied by a written piece explaining it. For the creative piece I got someone who thought they were crap at Maths to catch a ball. Here's the written bit, which I've shortened a bit:

Maths = God

Maths is everywhere, in all things, making things work, giving them beauty.

Most people say they're rubbish at Maths. Bit throw them a ball to catch and suddenly they can be calculating multiple variable, simultaneous differential equations at such speeds that the most powerful computers in the world cannot come close to competing. You don't have to be a mathematician to catch a ball, and neither do you need to be a theologian or Christian to engage with God and spirituality.

People usually don't like Maths because it's taught in a boring way, and so they think it's just about calculating correct answers using confusing techniques. They never get to hear the stories or see the beauty it brings or how it can transcend. The story of the 'invention' of the number zero, for example, is fascinating (it first turned up in India, possibly because as Hindus they were happy with the idea of a void, of nothingness. Apparently the West thought this was the work of the devil at first). And as with catching a ball, people aren't shown they've already got it.

Being able to prove Fermat's Last Theorem may be more complex or advanced maths than '1 + 1 = 2', but that simple sum, that any child could do, is still fully maths; there's nothing un-mathematical about it or less mathematical than Fermat's Last Theorem. Therefore no level of maturity or stage of faith is better than any other; they are all equally valid.

Talking of proofs, when I was at university there were two ways I could learn a theory and its proof - by rote, which only had limited use, or by actually understanding it. Then you wouldn't need to remember it - it would just flow, and you could apply it more easily.

I tend to think the goal is to get the correct answer, that that's the only thing of value. Yet of 183 questions Jesus was asked, he actually only answered the grand sum of...wait for it...3. But our maths teachers would try and drum into us that we needed to show our working out. Having the right answer was worthless without the working out; that was where the business happened, where the maths was. Our hidden persuaders (those things that influence our thoughts and actions without us realising it) can be like mistakes we make in our working out - it may mean the final answer is out, but there's still 'marks' that can be made from the working out. And we may judge people by their final 'answer'. But we don't know their working out, their journey, their hidden persuaders. Therefore we can never judge people.

The working out is one example of the importance of journey (Jesus said he was 'the way'. What if 'way' was translated as 'journey'? Then Jesus is the journey, not just the destination). Another example of journey is provided by fractals, those shapes where you can keep on zooming in, deeper and deeper, for infinity. Such is the nature of truth, the nature of God. You can never fully arrive, never fully know. And the deeper you journey in, the further you see there is to go.

Another example of journey is the number Pi. It's decimal places are infinite, so there's always more to know and learn. It also means we can never precisely give the area or circumference of a circle if you know its radius. It's an example of why Jesus could never give a complete description of what the kingdom of God is, only saying it's a bit like this or a bit like that.

Then, of course, there's the beauty of Maths - the glory of a flower, the uniqueness of a snowflake, the simplicity of the golden ratio - all beautiful because of maths. And that is why Maths = God.

i won't eat vegetables more than 2 inches long

2009-05-02T21:36:00.003+01:00

A couple ideas I've heard recently had a jolly pleasant convergence the other day, pleasant in a way that when the concepts of 'a nice cup of tea' and 'a sit down' have a get together.

On the Make Believe course we're doing there was a bit about 'I - thou' relationships versus 'I - it' relationships. We can treat people, objects, nature, relationships as merely 'it', where they are nothing more than a 'thing'. Or we can treat them as 'thou' - they have value, worth, are to be treated with love and respect.

The other idea is from the Richard Rohr talks we've been listening to recently. He mentioned a bit about being fully present in the moment (when you cook stew, just cook stew; if you have a biscuit, just have a biscuit) and how if you can accept something 100% then that can be enough to transform you.

So a couple of days ago I was doing the washing up and got to thinking about the dishwater. I always wash the cleanest things first; if there's a pan that's quite dirty I'll give it a quick rinse first before immersing it in the warm, soapy water. I realised that if you treat the dishwater with respect it will reward you with a longer, more effective cleaning experience. I was having an I-thou relationship with the dishwater. I was talking with someone about this and they told me about Jewish handwashing rituals, where the water represents God and love, so you immerse your hands (which represent your actions) in God's love.

After I'd done the washing up I made my lunch. I've always been one for chewing my food properly, yet I noticed that as I was chewing my mouthful I was already piling up my fork, ready to fill my mouth again as soon as I swallowed. So I decided to put my fork down after each mouthful and not pick it up again until I'd finished the last one. It was good to really savour the tastes and textures of the food, but it was also surprisingly hard work. Partly it just felt quite stop/start compared to the continuous flow I normally experience. But the main thing it showed up was my need to 'fill' space, my uncomfortableness with silence.

It's like living in the mind of a depressed hippy

2009-04-24T14:41:00.004+01:00

Kate's currently doing a part-time degree at the moment in Social & Political Studies. While she can usually find something that she'll find interesting for the essays, the lectures can, depending on the lecturer, be rather less than enthralling. So when she gets bored, which is pretty often, she'll give me a text saying, rather succinctly, 'bored'. Rather than taking it upon myself to provide something to pique her interest, which is a bit tricky in the 160 character limit of a text, I tend to take the 'teach a man to fish and he'll feed himself' approach and get her to draw me something. Invariably she'll not do anything I was expecting. Here are two of my favourites. The commission briefs were simply 'Jesus looking shocked' and '2 hamsters fighting:

What nationality is Mr Sheen? Polish

2009-04-10T16:20:00.003+01:00

I recently read a short article in the Observer on the subject of friendship, from a psychology angle. There was a quote which fed into the mid-life crisis stuff I've blogged about recently:

"We can be invalidated by events such as the bankruptcy of the firm that employs us, but most frequently we are invalidated by other people. A friend told me how her husband had used her password and pin to drain her bank account and fund his secret gambling habit. Losing her savings was a terrible blow, but far worse was her loss of trust in the person she saw as her best friend. When she described herself as falling apart, I assured her that what was falling apart were some of her ideas. All she had to do was to endure a period of uncertainty until she could construct ideas that better reflected her situation."

I guess that's exactly the kind of thing that can happen with a mid-life crisis. For whatever reason, you begin to see that you're not in control, you're going to die, and life will carry on without you. So you can either, like the woman, feel like your life has fallen apart, feel like you're whole being is being invalidated, and get bitter or be in denial about it. Or you can let it free you from a lot of stuff that, if you were to really think about it, you probably don't really want. So we'd probably all say we want to be beautiful, to be successful, to have a great job, to be fit and healthy. These are all good things to want, there's nothing wrong with them. Why would anyone want to be free of having those things?

But then, do you really want your happiness or sense of worth to be tied to having them? What are you going to do when you get old and start to sag and smell of wee? There's a Funkadelic song which has the line 'freedom is being free of the need to be free', thus proving that popping LSD and making dirty funk tunes doesn't mean that you're incapable of having anything deep to say about human nature.

On a vaguely related note, here's a quote from a report by the independent think-tank The New Economics Foundation: "Blind faith in economics has led us to believe that the market will bring us all the things that we want. We cling to the notion that contentment is obtained by the senses, by sensual experiences derived from consuming material goods. This feeds an emotion of sensual desire. At the same time, we are led to believe that others are our competitors who are longing after the same, limited resources as we are. Hence we experience fear, the fear of losing out, the fear that our desire will not be satisfied.

So we can observe that the whole machine of expanding capitalism is fuelled by two very strong emotions: desire and fear. They are so strong that they appear to be permanent features of our condition. Yet since these emotions are based on ignorance, a misconception of reality, they can be removed by the understanding of reality... Happiness is an inner experience, available to anyone, regardless of wealth or poverty. Further, fundamentally there is nothing that we lack. By developing the mind, our inner qualities, we can experience perfect wholeness and contentment. Finally, if we share with others, we will find that we are not surrounded by competitors. Others depend on us as we depend on them." Which isn't the kind of thing you'd expect from coke-snorting, City economists (which, if their lawyers happen to be reading, they're obviously not).

i ate a pork pie last week

2009-03-25T12:29:00.004Z

Following on from my last post about us needing people ahead of us to model what's possible, to help us develop our full potential, I've never had it modelled how to process and explore my feelings. I might get the initial sense of something, but I never know what to so with it or how to unpack it. My emotional vocabulary for describing how I feel is so minute it barely extends beyond 'good' or 'bad' (or, more likely, 'reasonably chipper' or 'a bit rubbish').

Partly this is because I had, either enforced or by choice, a lot of solitude in my teenage years - both literal and emotional. After we moved off the Isle of Wight it was a long time before I really had any friends, and we never talked about how we feel as a family. It's also partly because of the way I dealt with my depression at uni. It started at about 15, and came to a place of hating myself and would beat myself up in my head all the time. Eventually I got a point where I knew, with remarkable prescience, that this probably wasn't doing me much good and something needed to change. But I didn't deal with it by talking about it or seeking healing for my issues - I never knew that was possible. And anyway, I believed what I thought about myself was true. Instead, I dealt with it by avoiding thinking about it. I stopped myself feeling. Subsequently, I want to avoid anything that may cause me to feel pain. But also subsequently, I don't really feel much of anything and any kind of emotional seed or root has grown up pretty handicapped.

So now I want to develop my emotional intelligence. It'll be proper hard, not just because I've had little modelling to show me what's possible or how to do it (and for that I'm so grateful to Kate), but also because I'm also plain lazy. On top of that, even if I was feeling something I'd usually be unaware I was feeling anything at all, let alone know what emotion was. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything there, and presumably we have constantly have emotional reactions to whatever's going on. So maybe I'll start the discipline of asking myself 'what am I feeling right now?', and not just settle for 'tired' or 'nowt' for an answer. Feels a bit daunting though - like asking someone to describe colour for the first time when all they've ever seen is black and white.

I was reading a book yesterday about the Enneagram (an ancient personality type system). It said the defence mechanism for people of my type is 'numbing'. Which fits nicely with what I wrote above, and the fact that in my previous post I said I think my MS, an illness defined by numbness, is at least a bit psychosomatic. The good thing about all this stuff is that God can redeem and renew it. Which is nice.

let me lick your elbow

2009-03-10T18:32:00.004Z

We've been listening to a series of talks by Richard Rohr, who was the inspiration for the mid-life crisis series of articles I blogged about a while ago. He's a Franciscan monk, but from the couple of head shots I've seen of him it doesn't look like he wears a proper monk's robe, which is a shame. A monk who doesn't wear a robe is a bit like a cup of tea without milk. I suppose technically you can have it, but it's just not cricket.

Anyway, one of the talks was about some of the current understanding of brain development. This'll be massively over simplified, but as our brains develop, we need people ahead of us to model what's possible. This is particularly important at several key ages in our youth where our brains go through 'surges' in development, with the first aged 0-1, then another at about 4 years old, a third at about 7, the next at 11 and then another at around 15-18. At the latter stage our myelin sheaths strengthen and stabilise the neurons, finalising the development, which is interesting as in MS it's the myelin sheath that gets attacked and damaged, and is also interesting as at 15 I became very depressed and even more insular than I already was.

According to one scholar, at this stage our brains want to try to connect with what he calls 'transcendence' - the desire for something greater, which, Rohr was saying, fits with the fact that so many culture's rites of initiation are at this age, where the youth is shown the bigger picture. But without having the models and nurturing, the myelin sheath solidifies the nerve at that level, and you can become cynical and negative and think you'll never amount to much. The brain can even regress to earlier stages.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, this has given me a whole new depth of meaning to the verse in Romans that says to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. I never really got that verse, probably something to do with having the mind of Christ, whatever that means. But it seems there's something a lot more physiological going on. I've always secretly thought that my MS was, to a small degree st least, psychosomatic and that if I was going to be healed it would be linked to a change in my identity and general attitude to life, which is much closer to the biblical meaning of healing anyway, dealing more with the whole person (i.e emotional/physical/psychological) and was more of a process than event, involving a change of lifestyle.

The good thing about all the brain stuff is that it can be redeemed. It'll be hard work and painful but it's got to be worth the risk. It's like when Jesus talked about losing your life - what good is it if you gain the world but lose your soul? By avoiding this journey I may gain some semblance of emotional comfort, but in the long run will it be worth the potential cost?

he choked on his own legs

2009-03-02T19:02:00.005Z

I've been sat here for 20 minutes trying to start a blog post and failing miserably, which is largely because my head's too tired to take an idea and turn it into a proper blog post. So instead, here's a veritable smorgasbord of a post, of just stuff that's been in my think tank recently.

-My favourite blog comment recently, in response to someone mentioning that pug-faced little satirist Ian Hislop: 'Who's Ian Hislop? All I can find from Wikipedia is that he's that most sued man in British legal history'.

-Freud said that money will never make you happy because it's not an infantile desire, which is an interesting idea though I reckon anyone who's seen a couple of kids fight over a toy might disagree.

-My favourite word today is 'obfuscate'. Yesterday it was 'inculcate'.

-I always assumed that experts, or actually anybody above me in the general pecking order of life, knew what they were doing and what the right thing to do was, and the fact that I don't meant I couldn't ever do a proper job. I'm starting to think now that a lot of the time maybe they're making it up as they go along, and they just think they know what they're doing.

-We're always told we should be living as if Jesus might come back tomorrow. But how would you live if he wasn't going to come back for 1000 years? Would that make any difference?

-I'm currently pondering the bit in the bible that says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, and how it means a bit more than just having nice thoughts. Our brains are a bit mental. I'll do a longer post on it soon.

-The thing that made me laugh most recently was this picture, a genuine item up for sale on ebay. See if you can tell why this picture was taken by a man:

you're about as out of date as a walrus

2009-02-22T17:27:00.004Z

I watched an interesting documentary on BBC4 the other day about reading and the brain. Our brains were never designed to be able to read - there's no specific bit of the brain that deals with reading so we have to re-train different bits of the brain in order to be able to do it. There was a bit about stroke victims who lose the ability to read as the stroke severs the connections between the different bits of the brain that are used to read. As a result, while they may be able to perform the individual constituents that go into reading, they can no longer put it all together. For example, they may be able to see the letters of a word and know what those letters are, but they can't turn the word into something that has actual meaning. So taking the word 'yacht', we all know that's a word that's pronounced 'yot' and that means a boat owned by rich people. But a stroke victim may think it's pronounced like it's spelt and not have a clue what it means.

Anyway, this is all a long preamble to say I think my head feels a bit like that. I forget (ironically) that MS can mess up cognitive stuff. So a lot of the time when I'm listening to people or reading or watching stuff, while I can hear the individual bits of what's being said or an idea that's being presented, I find it really hard to see the processes going on behind it all or to be able to put two and two together, or simply to just retain the information long enough to know what's going on. I was reading an article the other day which admittedly was quite academic-y, and I really struggled to understand what it was on about.

I have no idea how to finish this post. Other than to say, in the example above of stroke victims reading the word 'yacht', sometimes will read it as 'boat'. Which is a bit mental.

apparently i'm not eligible for crufts

2009-02-10T20:01:00.002Z

Recently I've been wondering how real my relationship with God is. On one level I tick the boxes of doing Goddy things, and a lot of my thought time is spent talking to him. But I've noticed that it doesn't feel like there's much in the way of genuine connection, and that I'm just blubbering away without us really communicating. But then maybe that doesn't matter, and I'm just being like a baby with my heavenly progenitor. Babies babble away, probably fairly confident that they're making perfect sense, when obviously whatever's coming out of their tiny mouths is gibberish (and probably a lot of saliva and/or sick too). But that doesn't mean there's no interaction with you going on, or that they're not having a relationship with you. I hope that's what's going on with me and God, and maybe he's doing the divine equivalent of showing people endless, virtually identical photos of me where at best my facial expression is...wait for it...you'll never guess...who'd have thought it...are you ready?...look, there it is,... my facial expression is slightly different. And the angels are smiling politely but secretly are bored to tears, as God proudly shows them yet another photo of me, indistinguishable from all the others, except in this one I'm wearing a t-shirt that says 'Daddy's little princess'.

...and all the wolves were found upside-down in a box

2009-01-26T12:47:00.004Z

The Showroom have been hosting a something called Talking Point, a monthly discussion on some of the social and political issues that are in the news. Yesterday's was about the ways that faith and belief can impact on identity and society, so I popped along expecting there to be a decent sized group of typical Showroom frequenters, and felt slightly out of place with the 6 other middle aged women.

We got on to talking about community, and one dame was saying how there was more choice when it came to belonging to a community, be that a geographical area or a type of church or whatever, and that was a good thing. Thinking about it, while on one level I agree, I wonder if the greater freedom we have to try and change who we do life with hasn't de-skilled us when it comes to doing relationships. Kate read me a quote that said people say they want community, but actually they want privacy and convenience more. Now, if you don't like something about a group of people or you have any issues with anyone, you don't have to learn how to deal with it. You can just leave and go somewhere else. But according to CS Lewis's The Great Divorce, that was his definition of hell - a place where if you fall out with somebody then you just move away. But then CS Lewis never went to Southampton, so what would he know about hell.

i'm not crying. um, it's just raining on my face.

2009-01-10T11:24:00.004Z

I read an interesting article in Sunday's Observer (reasons to be fearful) about how, what with things like the credit crunch, terrorism and global warming, we're increasingly living in an age of anxiety. It reminded of the midlife crisis stuff I blogged about a few weeks ago (have a read here), about a series of articles I'd read in which the author talks about five key things we can learn when we go through a midlife crisis, namely that life is hard; you're going to die; you're not in control; you're not that important; it's not about you.

Reading the Observer article, it seemed like these are things we're maybe starting to learn as a society. We blindly assumed that our economic boom would live forever, but now we're seeing our banks die and housing bubbles burst. The weaker economy means life could get harder for people. The fact that no-one predicted the crash shows we're not really in much control over everything. The tired old man in me doubts there'll be much long lasting change for us as a society though. We'll still chase after our prosperity and go back to the old ways - the fact that the so-called experts are predicting the markets will pick up within the year (and the fact we eagerly believe them) shows people aren't expecting or willing to undergo much of a repentance, in the sense of changing direction.

2009-01-09T14:55:00.002Z

I forgot an award on the last post: the Thing That Makes Me Most Proud to be British award - it turns out it's illegal to not join a queue at a train station. I'm remember reading through the bumph for the UK citizenship test, which contained all kinds of useless information like how many members of parliament there are. Knowing that are 646 democratically elected individuals to represent our views isn't what makes us citizens - nope, it's knowing and respecxting the fact that we're a nation that queues, and that values queueing so highly, it's a crime to not queue. I was a little bit disappointed that the punishment for this heinous crime was not incarceration but merely a fine (and, in fact, that the crime was limited to queue jumping and not just a blanket everyone has to be in a queue regardless of why you're in the station), but still, it's a start.

fancy rotating my weasel?

2009-01-05T02:38:00.000Z

Hot diggedy, here's a few awards for 2008. I probably would have more but my memory's increasingly cack and I can't be expected to remember everything that happened.

Best Moment Award - May 17th, about 4.55pm, Wembley Stadium: Referee Mike Dean blows the final whistle and I'm there to witness Pompey win the world's greatest cup competition for the first time since 1939. You have no idea how good a feeling that is. It doesn't get much better than that, which sadly for Pompey it won't, which leads me onto the next award:

The I-know-I'm-a-Christian-Therefore-Should-Forgive-But-I-Really-Don't-Want-To award inevitably goes to Harry Redknapp. As he said in May after snubbing offers from Newcastle and Spurs: 'Portsmouth is my club - I feel an immense sense of loyalty and unfulfilled ambition. I could have left, but would have felt a great sense of betrayal. So they're stuck with me now. This will be my last job in football.'
Which is why it hurts, you twat.

Best quote - Sticking with football, Rennes player Stephane Mbia: 'I want Everton - it's my dream. Everton want me and Arsenal do too, so I'm waiting. I want to play for Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea. Chelsea is my favourite. If Manchester, Everton or Arsenal come for me, I will go. It's all very, very good. Manchester is my dream: I'd join them. And I like Everton. So I'm waiting.'

The I'm a Grown Up Now award - Finally passing my driving test, which segues nicely onto...

...the How Good Am I? award - I only made one minor fault.

Best Youtube clip - To give an unnecessarily detailed bit of background to this one, I'm generally not the world's greatest cat fan, for the very obvious and undeniable reason that they are the nefarious, pestiferous minions of Beelzebub himself. Every now and then though I'll come across one that I think wouldn't be so bad to live with, and a good example is the sneaky ninja cat here.

Best Film - 2008 was another good year films. There were three films where I had to stay in my seat when the credits rolled, unable to move due to the depth of emotion I was feeling, though it was a very different mix of emotions I felt. First off, The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, the true story of a man left totally paralysed apart from his left eye who wrote a book. Then there was Lars & the Real Girl, about a man and his relationship with a sex doll. Sounds crass, but it really should be watched by church leaders everywhere. And finally The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, showing the Holocaust through the innocent eyes of a child, and had a sledgehammer of an ending that gave me a glimpse of how God felt. Best documentary was Man on Wire, the true story of Phillipe Petit's illegal tightrope walk between the World Trade Centre's twin towers. An incredible story, grippingly told.

The Most Overrated Film award - No Country for Old Men. It certainly had its moments, with a lot a beautifully shot scenes and the shootout at the motel was gripping, but 4 Oscars? Really? And now I think about it, The Dark Knight was also a good film, but I think people were eulogising a little too much about Heath Ledger.

Biggest Surprise award - after not looking forward to feeling increasingly old in my review of 2007, I've been pleasantly surprised to find I'm wanting to embrace my age.

Dream 2009 - I do a skydive; I find a job I actually enjoy; Spurs get relegated; most of cat-kind is wiped out by a mysterious illness; I'm healed.

Nightmare 2009 - I'm still doing the same old job; Pompey go down; due to them receiving superpowers, the bizarre result of a mysterious illness, humankind is forced to bow down as slaves to our new feline overlords; my legs explode.

i once went scuba diving in the seychelles with moira stewart

2008-12-20T21:44:00.002Z

I've been reflecting on my faith chatting with a couple of friends recently. One of the main things I've noticed is how I now see it more as a journey. I've always been a lazy bugger, so I was a happy bedfellow with those bits of modern evangelical church that allowed me to think that arriving was the most important thing. I couldn't be arsed dealing with boring old process; I wanted to have arrived already, as that's where you got to have a nice cup of tea and a sit down. Preferably with a choccy digestive. But only if it's a plain choccy digestive, not milk choccy. Though having said that, if I was offered a milk choccy one I probably wouldn't turn it down. Certainly not if the alternative was a Gari-puke-baldi or, God-forbid, the travesty that is a Nice biscuit.

Anyway, it always vexed me that God never seemed to let me have it quick & easy, but finally I'm starting to see what God was up to and maybe there's something good about journeying after all. After all, Jesus said he was The Way. I've only ever heard that talked about in terms of Jesus being, at best, a model to try & live up to or, at worst, giving us a bunch of rules to obey. But if Jesus was interpreted as saying 'I am the journey', it adds a whole new level of meaning.

i'm gonna snap your nose offand toss it at a vicar

2008-12-01T19:13:00.003Z

A few weeks ago I came across a series of articles about the midlife crisis, but from the point of view of the male spiritual journey (read them here). I'm not really sure why they only talk about the male experience, which is neither here nor there, but in them the author talks about 5 'facts of life' - 5 truths that we can learn on our journey through life. He posits that we can typically learn these when we have have a midlife crisis, that time when, having spent your life trying to build your own little kingdom, things all go a bit pear shaped. The 5 facts are: life is hard; you're going to die; you're not in control; you're not that important; and your life is not about you.

Having a crappy disease like MS means I'm getting used to the idea that maybe life isn't necessarily all cookies and cream, so I've found the idea of this quite validating. Most people I've spoken to about it hasn't really got it, but I guess that's not surprising as they're not the most encouraging kinds of things you'd really want to face up to - they're totally in the face of the messages culture's always telling us. But actually, I think they can be really liberating. Take the idea of not being that important. L'oreal always tell us we're worth it; I've heard sermons that have said even if I was the only sinner in the world Jesus would still have died for me. So clearly I must be pretty important. But I remember reading an article last year about the men who've walked on the moon. I can't remember the exact figures, but a massively high proportion of them have started pursuing a more spiritual walk. And when you've seen a sight like that below, you surely can't help but be confronted with your own insignificance. For the astronauts, it's obviously been an experience that's humbled them and freed them to see that maybe there's something bigger and more important than they are.

i fell in love with a woman. she's got no eyes.

2008-11-23T15:34:00.002Z

I finally got round to watching the religion/politics episode of Simon Schama's series on the history of the American future. One of the things that struck me was that when the church preaches morals it turns people off. Proselytizing when it comes to things like abortion or booze just makes people feel judged, which is understandable as that's probably the spirit in which people harp on about it, and it's generally considered a Bad Thing. But when the church fights for the poor and oppressed, like in the abolition of slavery or 60's civil rights movements, those outside the church know it's an undeniably Good Thing.

I was wondering what the difference was. A lot of the time the morals and virtues that the church is upholding are also Good Things, so why don't others doff their caps in respect rather than thinking the church is a bit crap? I suppose the difference is that when it comes to something like abstinence from booze, the church is holding up behaviours as the most important thing, a standard to which we should live up to if we want to get blessed. But when the body is fighting for the poor, we're saying that people are the most important thing. Which is probably the more godly thing to do.

the time for whistling is past

2008-11-17T19:05:00.002Z

When I tell people I've got a maths degree, I tend to feel a bit embarrassed. Not embarrassed as I would be in those dreams I used to have where, for example, I'd go to work on a casual dress day and I'd decide to not wear any trousers as that's a perfectly normal thing, lots of people will be trouser-less, it's perfectly common, quite fashionable even, and then it slowly dawns on me that everyone elsse is clearly trousered to the max and I look like a bit of a tit. No, not as embarrassed as that. It's just people would think I was a bit of a geek, which clearly I'm not. I just think, perfectly rationally, that numbers are our friends.

It's been a while though since me and my old numerical chums spent any decent time together, so I was a tiny bit excited recently when the tweed & pipe television channel that is BBC4 showed The Story of Maths, about the history of maths. Sounds boring, but I don't know how anybody could fail to be at least a bit interested by the story of the invention of the number zero in India, an idea possibly helped by the cultural acceptance of the idea of there being nothingness, a void. Another doc I liked was The Maths of Chaos, which was about how they (the modernist magical wizards in the sky) thought they could predict, and therefore control, generally how the world would go, thanks to the power of maths. It seemed a nice idea, except of course it was utter balls. One of the things I found interesting was that the powers that be wanted to be able to control the world, yet at the same time were perfectly happy to simply trust that everything would turn out dandy.

you look like a monkey that's been shaved and then drop-kicked through topman

2008-11-05T18:52:00.003Z

I was always a tiny bit jealous of those who could say they remember where they were when JFK was shot. I wanted to be around for a momentous, potentially world changing event; to be a part with the worldwide family. I can remember where I was when I heard Diana had died (stood on the landing, feeling mildly indifferent), but that was only really life changing to Daily Mail readers. The first biggy I had was coming downstairs into the kitchen one September morning to see the one of the twin towers with smoke billowing out of it, thinking that was an incredibly unfortunate accident, and then the second tower got hit.

I didn't think I'd witness anything as epochal for a long time, but then at about 4am last night I was sat in my in my pants in my front room eating a Jacobs Hovis cracker when the presidential election was called in favour of Barack Obama. I'd been really enjoying the election race and was sad that it was going to be over, but glad to have been awake to see it's finish. Like most of us more liberal Europeans, I'd wanted Obama to win but despite him leading in all the polls I still wasn't 100% confident the Yanks would do the sensible thing. After all, this is a nation that thinks putting marshmallow on sweet potato is a good idea and for half the country the mullet is a haircut to be attained to, so I wouldn't put it past them to make an almighty cock up.

I've been a little amazed at the amount of euphoria there's been since, not just in America but around the world. But I'm now beginning to have my doubts, and this is why I think Barack's election is the single most pivotal event in history: he's the anti-christ! Anyone who's been unfortunate enough to read the Left Behind series of novels will know that they have the story of a young politician, considered by the world's population to be a saviour from all its ills but is in fact the devil incarnate. While the best use of the books is as toilet roll, they're clearly being more prophetic than, I don't know, the book of Revelation. I just told Kate I my suspicions and she told me I was being stupid, which only served to convince me further - my own wife has fallen under his demonic spell! She's clearly not the only one:

last night i dreamt you were a guinea pig, but with my head

2008-11-01T13:30:00.002Z

Not blogged for for a while as our laptop's been bust. While on one level I was itching to get it back so I could check the usual emails and the like, I've found I actually want to spend less time on the internet. It's not like the world's going to end if don't read a new notification on facebook immediately. But with this, I've found it hard to motivate myself to blog. So as a lazy post, here's my first assignment from the writing course I've started, where we had to describe a visit to some kind of cultural event, which in my case was a trip to see Pompey play Bolton way back in March.

My excitement had been building slowly but surely all day, and now we could see the stadium my heart began to beat a little faster, like a child nearing the sweet aisle at Tesco. I felt my pride surge as I saw the first group of Portsmouth supporters but resisted the urge I got to announce eagerly to them that I too am a true blue and maybe we could be best friends, for the simple reason that they’d probably think I was a nutjob. Still, as we started to see more and more fans I savoured the shared experience, this feeling of being a part of something. I thought it was probably the closest I’d ever come to knowing what it was like for religious pilgrims hundred of years ago, as we joined the flow of worshippers congregating at this temple to the great God of Football, hoping that we’d witness a thing of beauty. Sadly it wasn’t likely that we’d witness anything beautiful here, for this particular temple was the home of Bolton Wanderers, hardly the most pulchritudinous of teams. Not even the most evangelical of believers would expect God to pull off a miracle of that magnitude. However, as we entered the ground it felt more like a high church rather than the Pentecostal church I’d been hoping for. Only a few seats were taken up and the handful of people there seemed to be speaking in hushed tones. That was hardly surprising though, seeing as Bolton were a team hovering above the relegation zone - maybe people were just paying their respects as before a funeral. Yet it was a full hour to kick-off, and I was pretty confident the ground would fill up 3pm.

The Portsmouth football team are notoriously bad travellers, their away form giving scant reward to us fans for our loyalty. In response to the frequent dearth of on-pitch joy and pride we travelling supporters have to entertain ourselves. So we were glad to hear the stadium announcer read the team sheets as it gave us the chance to amuse ourselves with a cheerful chorus of ‘scummer’ on hearing the names of two of Bolton’s players, their only crime to have once played for Southampton, our fierce south coast rivals. It’s also a source of pride to prove we’re a better quality of fan than the home support, and as the 22 players battle on the pitch the supporters duel with the volume, duration and passion of their chanting. Sure enough, as the referee blew his whistle to start the game the two drummers in the Portsmouth end struck up their fervent rhythm, and some unseen worship leaders started the faithful choir in their songs of adoration. Now it felt more Pentecostal, as we sang, clapped and raised our hands, doing our bit as Portsmouth’s 12th man. After five or ten minutes of non-stop singing, the Bolton fans responded with their first feeble song, and we gave an appreciative, ironic cheer and a sarcastic round of applause, smug in the knowledge that, on the terraces at least, victory is ours.

but i thought all cows point magnetically north

2008-09-24T16:34:00.002+01:00

I've been reading, slowly, as I always read books these days, The Shack, by William P Young. It's a fantastical tale of a man grieving the abduction and murder of his young daughter who spends the weekend in the shack where the event happened with the trinity - God the father, son and holy spirit. Except the father happens to be a big African woman. As American Christ-lit goes it's easily the best written that I've read, in that it doesn't grate in the way the likes of the Left Behind series does, and it deals with some thought-provoking stuff. As an example, here's a conversation between the man and the father bit of the trinity, about the human-ness of Jesus:

'"Although by nature he is fully God, Jesus is fully human and lives as such. While never losing the innate ability to fly, he chooses moment-by-moment to remain grounded. That is why he is called Immanuel, God with us, or God with you to be more precise."
"But what about the miracles, the healings, the raising people from the dead? Doesn't that prove that Jesus was God - you know, more than human?"
"I can fly, but humans can't. Jesus is fully human. Although he is fully God, he has never drawn upon his nature as God to do anything. He has only lived out of his relationship with me, living in the very same manner that I desire to be in relationship with every human being. He is just the first to do it to the uttermost - the first to absolutely trust my life within him, the first to believe in my love and goodness without regard for appearance or consequence."
"So when he healed the blind?"
"He did so as a dependent, limited human being trusting in my life and power to be at work within him and through him. Jesus, as a human being, has no power within himself to heal anyone."'

I've never really got that bit in Philippians that says that Jesus, though being God in nature, didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped. But this has helped me get a bit more understanding. Although I'm trying to be like Jesus (and by trying I mean in a half-arsed kind of way), I'd always thought that there'd be a bit of a glass ceiling in the way, namely that for all his ability to hurt and be tempted like us, he was still God, and that gave him a bit of advantage. Like a tabby trying to compete with a lion. You know in theory that lion's still a cat, but it's whole different kettle of fish. But knowing that we've got the ability to do everything we did, and can even (though I'm still not sure I fully agree yet with this) have the same level of intimacy with the bearded one of the trinity, I find is quite a good motivator.

for my next miracle i shall turn water into funk

2008-09-12T16:53:00.003+01:00

A mate was round a couple of days ago and we started having an interesting discussion about salvation and how you know if you (or anyone else) was saved. He tends to take the bible quite literally so was of the general opinion that surely you have to confess the name of Jesus, to actually speak it out, as that's what the bible says. I was saying that I think you can still know God and be following him and even love him even if you haven't actually 'met' him or know who he is.

My mate found this a bit of a hard concept to agree with, arguing, quite reasonably, that you can't love a person you haven't met yet - if you're single, how could you possibly love your future, as of yet un-met partner if you don't know their name or what they're like. Which is a perfectly logical point when it comes to normal human relationships. But God isn't a normal human. God's so much bigger than that, embodying character traits so wholly and completely that to love and value and seek after and give worth to them is, to at least some degree in my mind, to know God himself - things like compassion, truth, mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, creativity, love. Regarding what he was saying about needing to confess the name of Jesus, there's more to his name than just those 5 letters. Names to the Hebrews were never just simple identifiers but always embodied meaning, defining who a person was. I reckon to agree with who God is, even if you don't explicitly know it's God, can be part of confessing his name.

There's a great bit at the end of The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia, that sums up how I think about it all. After the said last fisticuffs between the followers of Aslan and the servants of Tash, a false god type of thing, Emeth, a servant of the erstwhile god, meets Aslan, who he recognises as being the true Glorious One, worthy of all honour. He's naturally a bit gutted he happened to have been on the wrong side, yet Aslan redeems him, saying:
'...no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to Tash. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.'
When Emeth points out that he'd been seeking Tash all his days, Aslan replies 'Beloved...unless they desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.'

she died of loneliness. loneliness and rabies.

2008-09-01T07:44:00.004+01:00

Here are some sapient thoughts, shamelessly plagiarised and passed off as if it's my own perspicaciousness:

I want to be able to shop at the supermarket and not use a self service checkout, and I like it that I just have to put my rubbish outside the door and not drive it to a tip every week, and I like being able to get the bus ... therefore the jobs of checkout person, bin man, and bus driver are valuable and I already value the people who do them because I want their role to exist in the world ... therefore I should value myself for the job I do, whatever it is (as long as it isn't something very unvaluable like drowning puppies or beating up old ladies, which it isn't, so I'm OK). All jobs make up a different part of society and all are needed. It would be a bit rubbish if everyone was a doctor. It would be just as rubbish if everyone had 'middle class' jobs and no-one was there to fix your car or mend the roads.

Also, I think it is important to focus on achievements rather than on supposed failures. Someone said that the absence of God is hell, so focusing on where God isn't probably wont feel too good. So where has he been?? Where has he helped you achieve things, given you significance?? I was reading a book on Finding Your Strengths just yesterday and it said how society is set up to make career progression really difficult unless you're happy to give up the things that you are good at, i.e. go from doing something to being a manager of something, even though you love just doing it not managing it, but that's the only way to get more money, status, etc. It suggested (and so do I) that being in a job that you enjoy and are good at is an amazing achievement in itself, even if you see it as further down the 'food' chain of careers than what you might see as important jobs, like surgeons, or politicians or whatever. You probably wouldn't find significance in those anyway, because you wouldn't enjoy them or be able to sustain being in them (unless you are hiding secret prowess at cutting people open and running countries). Finding a job that you don't get bored in and are happy to get up in the morning and do is miles further on than a job where you don't know what on earth to do and even when you do you don't want to.

I can get annoyed at the my grade of pay, because I deserve more pay than I get. But then I catch myself thinking that and wonder who it is that I think does deserve that amount of pay .. no-one does, we all deserve better pay because we're all God's kids and he thinks we're ace. So then I have to remember that I get my worth from Him and not from my employer and that helps calm me down. If I put my worth in where I am in the economic scale or trust the market system to tell me how important I am, not only am I going to be worth very little, but I'm also (I think) worshipping a false god, the god of economic worth. Worship is 'giving worth to' and whatever I give my worth, my value to, is the god I am choosing to believe. And I don't want to believe the gods of economic worth that tell me I'm only somebody if I have a significant job, have money, have a house, have financial freedom or power.

he could remove a man's blood & replace it with tizer without him knowing it

2008-08-27T11:28:00.002+01:00

I got evangelised the other day by a Muslim taxi driver, which was quite entertaining. I've generally never been a big fan of the bible bashing brand of evangelism, and now I've been on the receiving end of it I know why I don't like it. The guy just talked at me and told me stuff about what the Qu'ran says. He didn't listen to me and didn't really want to find out about my story. In response to anything I said he would just quote more of the Qu'ran at me that didn't really have any relevance to what I'd said. As I expected he pointed out that Jesus is an important prophet in Islam but us Christians have got it wrong because there's only one God and Jesus never said he was God. He didn't really know what to say when I pointed out that Jesus made it pretty clear that he was when he said 'before Moses and Abraham,...wait for it...you'll never guess what...this'll be worth the wait...any second now......I Am!'. The guy just carried on speaking at me.

I learned some stuff I didn't know before though. Apparently death visits us 5 times a day to check up on us and have a look at what we're doing, and it all gets stored up for when we die (which, incidentally, will involve the most painful experience for those of us with balls, as our soul will be dragged from our bodies like being dragged through a thorn bush. For those of you with boobs, your most painful experience will be childbirth). I asked him if this would decide whether or not we get into heaven, but he didn't have much of an answer. He said something about genuine repentance so I asked if forgiveness was guaranteed, and he started going on about how Allah's got 99 names and one of them is 'merciful'. I kept asking him if forgiveness was guaranteed and he kept avoiding a direct answer until he eventually conceded that no it wasn't.

Anyway, I found it all quite interesting. And it just served to underline that simply being told 'This is The Truth' is dis-empowering and puts people off. Where's the shared experience, the shared learning and journeying, the humility?

it's not my fault if my hamster looks like stalin

2008-08-13T01:03:00.002+01:00

- I watched the new batman film the other week which, while a very good film, is never as good as everyone's making out, and not as good as everyone would be making out if they weren't eulogising about Heath Ledger. He was excellent as the Joker, but again I don't rate his performance as highly as most. That's mostly because reviews have been making out that he embodied pure evil. But the thing is, I wasn't scared of him, and the reason I wasn't scared was that he was intent on destroying everything. People I've spoken to have said that's precisely what was scary about him. But for me, there was no suspense - there was no question of who's he going to kill next; of maybe one minute he'll extend mercy or the next minute he'll be cruel. It was just inevitable that he would always choose to destroy. But when something's inevitable, it becomes much less fearful - it's fear of the unknown that gets me. Maybe that's what comes from having a chronic illness.

- Wall-e, the latest offering from Pixar, provided a cinema experience of a very different nature. Who'd have thought it would be something as simple as having the foreground and background out of focus that was all that was needed to make computer animations seem more realistic and 3-d. It's made me laugh that some quarters in America have complained about its leftie politics for criticising Western consumerism. I liked the lesser messages of the film that just because something's a bit rubbish and not as good as you hoped doesn't mean it's worth giving up on, and if you turn off your TV/computer/mobile maybe you'll notice beauty and possibilities. I hate Vodafone's 'make the most of now' tag. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm going to do just that and whenever I see one of those adverts I'm going to use it as a reminder to open my eyes and look around me and see if I can't find something beautiful.
You can watch the delightful pre-film short 'Presto' here.

- More media input, this time from the radio courtesy of Radio 4's Just a Minute. It made me wonder if enjoying that special brand of Radio 4 comedy (quick witted, droll, innocent while simultaneously capable of being wonderfully filthy) was a sign of me getting old. But I don't think it's necessarily that my tastes have changed that betray my aging; it's more that I don't care about admitting I like it. If someone was to walk in my room at uni to find me listening to Just a Minute, rather than me waxing lyrical about it's quintessentially English celebratory marriage of the English language and comedy, I probably would have been mocked instead for being a bit of a geek. Now I couldn't give a toss.

my farts hospitalise small children

2008-08-09T03:17:00.005+01:00

A lighter post this time. I remember seeing Killa Kella a few years ago at the sadly missed Phonetics nightclub. He's a beatboxer who did the most incredible stuff I've ever heard come out of someone's mouth. He was able to make a whole song, with a beat, overlayed with scratching and vocal lick, all just using his mouth. So if you thought beatboxing was just about making a bit of a rubbish beat, here's a couple video clips. It wasn't until half way through watching the first one that I realised he was making every sound you heard. (Pause them before playing them to give them a chance to load first).

Look at the range of colours. They go all the way from deep profound muffin through the angry beige right out there to a very aggressive nutmeg

2008-07-24T23:37:00.005+01:00

Some things i have found interesting:

-The richest 300,000 Americans earn as much as the poorest 140 million. That's mental.

-I liked this quote, from A Churchless Faith by Alan Jamieson, regarding the evangelical/charismatic/pentecostal church's emphasis on evangelism:
"we know how to cut the ripe harvests down but we don't know how to stack them into sheaves & take the sheaves into the haystack. And we don't know what to do with the stuff then. We don't know how to get the ears off & turn it into bread. All they know how to do is mow the harvest, so the whole experience of church growth is one of someone who goes out with a message & ultimately they do not bring anyone beyond their own experience... The role & the whole thrust of the church is to prepare gallons of spiritual milk just to keep those people coming back week after week. They never expect to take them beyond that childhood stage to a place where the people are independent of the leaders...

...The focus of these churches on evangelism rather than spiritual development, on exuberant rather than reflective forms of worship, on prayer that is demanding or coercive in its approach rather than a meditative listening to God, on the cognitive aspects of faith rather than people's experience of God or their feelings, and on hierarchical structures of leadership & control rather than inclusive forms of decision making, all serve to alienate..."

-As a way of exploring that spiritual development, I'm liking the idea of making church much more 'unspiritual'. Kate's been reading a book that had a bit about writing personal meditations, and sometimes you might just write a reminder to top up your car's windscreen wash but that's ok because maybe that was all God was wanting to talk to you about. I've heard people give advice about having those kinds of thoughts when you were wanting to pray or something, saying either to write those things down so you won't continued to be distracted by them and freeing you to focus on the proper business of being spiritual with God, or just that you should learn to control your thoughts and make them submit.
While obviously they are a distraction a lot of the time, I've never really considered that they could be part of your relationship with God. Which is a bit daft given that a whopping chunk of life is given over to humdrum tasks. And maybe God gets bored of being asked all the time to fight against you having a cold or to change somebody's heart; maybe sometimes he just wants to let you know what he thinks would be a great thing for you to add to your weekly food shop.

On a similar vein, if I was to ever find myself in a small group type of affair, I'd like to, say, have a discussion on what we watch on telly. Not just about what we watched the night before, but talk about why we watch it, how it affects us, that kind of thing (interestingly, when you're just idly watching something you have as much brain activity as a coma patient). We're all spiritual beings, but we're not purely spiritual, so why do we think God's only interested in being spiritual? I like to think there's a lot of things on this earth that'll be in heaven (like sausages and repeats of Fawlty Towers), but it's probably fair to say Grand Theft Auto won't make the grade; yet there's been a few times recently when I've kept on getting killed doing a mission so I asked God to help me, and low & behold I've done it at my next attempt. Which got me thinking about anything rated as an 18 - I would always have assumed God would most likely be a bit disapproving. But actually 18's are often only 18's because they contain things that are, for a lot of people, not inherently wrong but are just a part of everyday real life - sex & swearing & the like. Maybe it's only not healthy when it's gratuitous. Take swearing for example: when I'm really going through it, I'll swear. Not for shock or anything, but just because sometimes no other words will bear the weight of what I'm feeling, and God's always fine with it. But if I was to just swear when I was feeling fine, I tend to feel God say 'your swearing just then was terribly amusing, and I use the word 'amusing' quite wrongly. In fact, baby Jesus is now crying, because that odious utterance from your scatological gob has made him go temporarily deaf.'

God: the original Tony Soprano

2008-07-11T14:30:00.002+01:00

A couple posts ago I wrote about the tension between feeling like I should be constantly achieving, and then the fact that life is just normal a lot of the time, and I read this last week from 'Seven longings of the human heart' by Mike Bickle, which I found encouraging:

"We easily become preoccupied with seeking what looks and feels signifcant to us while devaluing faithfulness in the small things. However, eternal impact is mainly achieved through our faithfulness in small things. Only a few people in history have an international platform like Billy Graham or a worldwide economic reputation like a Bill Gates. When we think about it we realise that God has called only a few to do large things. Of the billions of people in history, all of them are called to be faithful in small things. To some this is synonymous with insignificance or irrelevence. Nothing could be further from the truth. God promises that if we are faithful in the everyday scenarios with little public acknowledgement, he will esteem and remember them forever."

peter, your dog is giving me diabetes

2008-06-29T18:12:00.004+01:00

1. They (the magical wizards in the sky) have done experiments on newborn kittens where they've covered one eye for the first seven days of its life. After that first week, a week probably spent being photographed, soft focus, sat in a wicker basket with other little kittens so it can then be turned into a poster with a verse from the Psalms and sold in christian bookshops, they've uncovered the eye and discovered it'll be blind in that eye even though there's nothing wrong with it, and will never regain its sight. Putting aside your opinion of cats (cute & adorable versus agents of beezlebub), this just goes to show we need to stimulate all our faculties.

2. I read in interesting article about charity in the Observer the other week, with some eye-opening stats. Between 2000 and 2006, donations to charity increased by 8%, which sounds impressively generous, except when you consider the economy was registering a 20% growth. The median weekly giving is £2.50, while the average disposable weekly income is £500. The average time we devote to helping others is 4 minutes a day. 88% of the population believes there's a social divide in the UK, and 63% think it will be greater in 5 years. Yet only 6% thought they'd get involved in something to help the poorest in their community. The article blamed the poor health of our benevolence on the decline of religion and increase in women who work.

smell me

2008-06-29T02:36:00.002+01:00

I was putting away some freshly washed clothes a couple days ago, and was feeling the existential futility of it all. It's a feeling I've been having a lot really, that I'm not achieving anything in life or heading in any definite direction. I was just doing a humdrum chore. It needing doing of course, but if I was to get to the end of my life and look back, I don't reckon I'd think, hot dang, I'm glad I put my socks in a drawer 'cause who knows how many lives that saved.

Church, and society in general, give out this message that we should be achieving, bearing fruit, working towards a vision, changing the world. They're all good things, but then there's lots in the bible about just simply getting on and living a quiet life. So I figured the important thing isn't thinking that putting away underwear is a pointless task that isn't going to transform anyone's life and bear fruit I can be proud of; if all we were meant to do is build kingdoms then God wouldn't have allowed life to need so many menial tasks. The important thing is whether or not I'm doing those things with God. One of the things I enjoy about living with people is those incidental times when you're not doing anything important, you're just doing the washing up together or sat around drinking tea and eating hobnobs. They help build relationships, and having a relationship with God is, I'm presuming, most of the point of us.

it was wrong. wrong like spam in suspenders is wrong

2008-06-23T17:35:00.002+01:00

The other week at the meditation thing that we go to we talked about pain, and read a bit from a book by Rob Bell about sometimes it's important just to sit with someone in their pain. I can't remember how it was phrased, but it made me think of the quote from Jesus when he said when two or more are gathered in his name then he's there. I've only ever heard that quoted in terms of prayer and worship, and I hadn't ever considered that when you just sit with someone who's hurting, not saying anything 'cause sometimes words won't change anything but the silent companionship is real somehow, then Jesus is there too. Not that he's not there when you're on your own, but I found that very comforting.

Then we did a thing where we had some stones to represent either our own pain or the pain of someone we know, and we could either hold on to it or put it down. Normally I'd want to put it down as soon as possible, seeing as I generally want to avoid pain as much as possible. But I chose to hold on to it this time, because I'm wanting to go deeper generally, and I looked at the stone as being a weight to pull me down. If I keep getting rid of the weights I'll only ever be shallow.

Talking of which, a few weeks ago at another meditation we did a thing with a load of coloured bits of paper and had to pick which colours we associated with God and ourselves. One of the sheets I picked for me at first looked like a plain sheet of white paper, i.e. colourless and with nothing there. But then when you looked closer at it there was actually a bit of pattern and detail to make it bit more interesting. But not very much. Which I thought was quite apt, seeing as a lot of the time the inside of my head is just a like a hamster running round on a wheel, oblivious to anything that's going on.

your kidney takes my breath away

2008-06-12T17:48:00.003+01:00

A few posts ago i said something about the evangelical church's emphasis on being in the Promised Land now ('you look like a niknak in a ginger wig'), and I just read something that I liked on a similar vein in 'A Churchless Faith' by Alan Jamieson, about people who've left the church but haven't left their faith. He was talking about the writings of Catholic spiritual types and others about stages of faith development, and the use of story in sharing those stages:

"For previous generations of christians...such writings were well known and the progressions they describe have been generally accepted. In the Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic churches, concerned to deal with fact, not fiction and segregated from the writings of Catholic spiritual directors, there is often little mention and even less understanding of the idea of faith stages and of faith being a journey with normal, even predictable crises and change points."

Like I said, it seems the modern evangelical church only really understands journeying in terms of 'we should be in the Promised Land right now, and we're going to try our damnedest to get there as soon as possible (and if you don't agree maybe you need to get some prayer)'. I could imagine part of the justification for that would be to say 'we can't afford to delay - you could die tomorrow/Jesus could rock up tomorrow/people are dying right now without knowing Jesus'. Which is all true I suppose, but the problem with that, as Kate pointed out, is that it makes a value judgement of the different stages. I'm pretty certain Jesus isn't going to judge me on whether or not I'm living a life of complete inner healing and freedom by the time we finally meet; no-one criticises a baby for not being able to walk, and I reckon most of us don't think it's all that healthy just how quick teenagers seem to grow up.

So there you go. Savour the journey - who knows what jolly lovely scenery you might miss, or what important lessons you could fail to learn that might come in handy when you get there.

i see a boundary and i eat it, wash it down with a cup of hot steaming rules

2008-06-08T16:31:00.004+01:00

1. Euro 2008 has started. Hooray for football. Obviously it's s bit hard to get excited without England being there, but at least it means avoiding the usual frustration at us being useless for all but one of our group games then the pain of us going out in the quarter finals. I'll be supporting the Pompey boys there of course (Kranjar for Croatia, Diarra for France (though I'll only be cheering him on - I can't quite bring myself to fully support France)), but really I just hope football wins.

2. 'Rubbish' is my new favourite word. I remember my English teacher hating the words 'nice' and 'good' as they were unimaginative and there was a veritable cornucopia of other words that could be used, and he's probably say the same thing about 'rubbish', but it's just a very satisfying word to say. I watched a documentary with Marc Dolan the other day where he was filming in China when the police came over to stop him filming, which he did because he 'didn't want to go to prison, because I've heard Chinese prisons are rubbish.' It was a pleasing use of the word.

3. Some things I'm thankful for: homemade smoothie lollies on hot days; the reduced bit in the little Jacksons shop round the corner, rarely without a bargain; last night's leftovers for lunch; le creuset casserole dishes; not needing temazepam to sleep.

4. I always kind of liked it when I saw a random shoe lying on the street (while at the same time feeling slightly sad, that the shoe will never be worn again). I wonder how it came to be discarded, and if the owner gets up the next morning and goes to put their shoes on but then gets confused and maybe a little upset that they only seem to have one, and so forlornly limp to work. Anyway, I like this website here.

he had a particularly nefarious spleen.

2008-05-23T16:49:00.004+01:00

Nearly a week later and I'm still buzzing. If you watched it you'll know it was hardly justification for why the beautiful game has that moniker (though it was still more entertaining than last man utd v chelsea last year), but it was still such an enjoyable game, largely helped by two sets of fans who were up for it. It's not such a special occasion for fans of the big four - they've all been there plenty of times over the last few years. But with neither Pompey nor Cardiff having been to a cup final since before the second world war, and every chance it'll be just as long till our next shot at some Wembley glory, you've got to make the most of it. The atmosphere was incredible. It was weird being there in person, as I missed out on all the things that would help get me in the whole occasion. So there was no watching the beeb's pre-match build up, with the teams giving their always slightly embarrassing introductions to camera ("David James, goalkeeper."), seeing the team coaches arrive at Wembley, getting the story of that year's cup. Then the other things that you normally see in close-up - the singing of the national anthems, the teams being introduced to some random VIP (disappointingly, no royalty this time, just Bobby Robson) - I almost missed as they were just this tiny people on the far side with their backs to me. I almost had to keep pinching myself, reminding myself that this was the final of the world's greatest cup competition at one of the world's most famous stadiums, that there were millions around the country and the world watching (400 million a couple years ago), and I, along with 90,000 others, was there. Fortunately we forgot our terrible end of season form and remembered how to defend, and slowly took control of the game, except for the last 10 minutes, but that was just to make it exciting. We erupted at the final whistle of course, and as Sol lifted the cup we erupted all again, giving a joyful, grateful cheer as each player in turn lifted the cup. Being a terribly spiritual chap, it brought a tear to my eye when I thought about what it would be like on that day when Jesus rocks up and takes us home, and we all celebrate that victory, knowing that MS and sickness and fear and doubt and injustice and crap have all been defeated. It was incredible celebrating then with the few tens of thousands of raucous Pompey fans; imagine what it'll be like with the millions or billions of people we'll be with then.

screw you, hippy

2008-05-16T17:25:00.003+01:00

After years thinking Pompey would never win anything, when the definition of a good season was to not be involved in a relegation dogfight and mid-table mediocrity was like some kind of utopia, tomorrow will be my second trip in a month to watch the boys in blue at wembley.

Before going to the semi-final that I'd been praying that I'd be able to just savour the experience regardless of the result, and to not let my hopes and fears about the result hamper my enjoyment of the experience. And I was very thankful that that happened. This time round though I've found it hard to get excited, mostly due to the fact that we've been proper rubbish the last few games and I'm expecting us to get beat. I've tried praying again that I'd not worry about the result and just enjoy it - it'll probably be another 69 years till our next final so I should make the most of it. But then my I realised I've been having this train of thought: God blessed me not only by answering my prayer but, like Solomon, decided to bless me even more for the selflessness of my prayer by giving us the win. But I've had my turn, and now there's some little kid from Cardiff who's spent all his short little life in & out of hospital with some un-named illness, his house burnt down last christmas and all his presents went up in smoke, his house was broken into the day before his birthday and all his presents were stolen, and last week his pet gerbil was torn to pieces and eaten by a cat right in front of his eyes. And God would consider himself cruel and unjust not to let him see his team lift the cup.

behold the nazi turtle, a fresh water fascist for all the family.

2008-05-10T14:05:00.003+01:00

-following on again from the last couple of posts, i feel i need to repent a little of hardening my heart a bit to the charismatic, evangelical church. yes, they get a lot of things wrong but they also get a lot right, so may God bless'em and their little cotton socks. there's plenty enough disunity already in God's church and it makes baby Jesus cry. i don't want to add to that, and i don't want to miss out on anything God may want to give me, or on any opportunity for me to bless him back, just because i've hardened myself to a bit of his church. chucking the baby out with the bath water would really make baby Jesus cry.
as an aside, i heard about the church of someone i know down south where some of the members looked through the history of their church, with the intention of identifying where there'd been recurring problems or they'd got things wrong. then they went to members past and present to repent to them where they hadn't been supported properly. that's an incredibly powerful and humbling thing to do, and probably the sort of thing it would be good for a lot of churches to do.

-i've been watching odd bits of bbc4's medieval season, the highlight of which has been the 4 part 'inside the medieval mind' on thursday nights (it's finished now but you can still see some of them on the bbc iplayer). each episode focused on a different topic (the shift from the medieval to modern mindset, sex, spirituality, & class). in my geeky documentary loving way i found it fascinating to see the formation of some of those ways of life we take for granted, and to realise there was a time when those things didn't exist. so there awas a time when the search for scientific truth wasn't the most important thing but people were happy to accept mystery. the invention of the clock meant people started to stop being in step with natural rhythms but meant bureaucracies now had a tool to control people with. you used to be able to get married just by verbal agreement, but then the church (for reasons i can't remember) decided it should become part of the sacrament. democracy came about, not for the good of the people, but just to make a bit of money. and there was a time when the middle classes, that group to which so much of society and government conspires to get us to aspire to, didn't even exist. top notch telly.

you look like a niknak in a ginger wig

2008-04-23T17:19:00.000+01:00

following on from my last post, where i started to talk about evangelicalism, one of the things that it focuses a lot on, that it attains to, is the promised land - that the desert and all it's trappings is not where God wants us to be, and we should all be living now in the promised land if only we could just stop living like orphans and believe. as long as we don't all start topping ourselves en masse to get there sooner, as a basic theology i think that's basically true. but that's the problem with it - it's a bit basic. it's desire to be living in the promised land means it can miss out on the beauty that can be found in the crap. which isn't to say i think we should be wallowing in it, but life just is hard sometimes, and sometimes that's ok. like when the ms was getting worse and i was desperately getting all the prayer i could, and people kept telling me God knew how i felt, yet the thing i felt God kept saying to me was, 'now you know how i felt'. ecclesiastes says there's a time to weep, to mourn, to give up, yet God makes everything beautiful in its time.

i was talking to someone recently and was surprised when they said they thought there was too much talk about the desert at church. i reckon there's not enough. or maybe it's just the wrong kind of talk - it does get mentioned, but sometimes it feels like they're just paying lip service to it without really understanding what it means. there's plenty in the bible about persevering in suffering, but to be honest telling me that God doesn't want me to be suffering doesn't actually help me to persevere. it may get my hopes up for a bit but when nothing changes it makes me want to give up, not persevere. i think it'd be more helpful to be taught how to be content whatever my situation, and how to live and journey with God this side of the jordan rather than i have to cross it into the promised land before i can make anything of my life; then God can lead me across when he (and i) are good and ready.

you smell like soup

2008-04-16T10:06:00.002+01:00

the other day i went way back to the beginning of this little blog and skimmed through a load of old posts. the thing that struck me was that, as well as posting a lot more and getting a ton more comments (but that was back in the day when blogging was everyone did and now people are too busy avoiding doing whatever it is they're meant to be doing by going on facebook), most of my posts were to do with 1) moaning about being ill and 2) how i was doing with God.

but now i haven't really got anything to say about those things because 1) i don't moan about being ill so much and 2) i've not felt particularly close to God for a good couple of years. psychologists have noted that there are several stages of grief people can go through after suffering a bereavement, which at the most basic include shock/denial; anger; bargaining; depression/despair; and ending up with acceptance. i think since starting this blog i've gone through all the denial/anger/despair stages and now i'm just at the acceptance stage. and simple acquiesence doesn't really make for much of an interesting blog post.

the thing with accepting it though is that i don't really expect i'm going to be healed, which i'd always thought i would be in the past. which means i have to ask, did i really have faith i was going to be healed, or was clinging to that hope the way i dealt with the denial and bargaining stages? honestly, i don't know. it was probably both - some genuine faith, some good old denial. but certainly the longer it's gone on, the more it's worn down the faith that did believe i'd be healed. and i guess that's part of the reason why i don't feel like i've been particularly close to God for ages. this is oversimplifying it, but two or three years ago when i was properly going through it i had a much more desparate need, and God was the only one who could meet that, or at least get me through, so i sought him much more. now i'm stronger, but with that strengthening there's almost inevitably come a hardening of my heart too.

admittedly it's not that i necessarily felt closer to God a few years ago; i just had a greater hope and expectation for the way he would cause things would work out, and a definite need. and when your opinion of God is heavily influenced by what the evangelical church tells you should be your day-to-day experience, and you start to give up on those hopes and expectations, it's inevitable that you feel like you're giving up on God and he's given up on you. though actually i think it's more that i'm giving up on the evangelical church. like a lot of people i'm on the first steps of trying to separate who i believe God really is from where modern (by which i mean, of modernity) evangelicalism has only given a partial picture of who he is, which can lead to a slightly skewed, incomplete experience of God. but that's a whole other thing for another post.

i just did a tummy shame

2008-04-10T11:16:00.004+01:00

it was an awesome day, the second best of my life. i slept terribly but a big cup of tea and just the sheer excited adrenalin got me through it. wembley's massive (90,000 capacity compared to fratton park's 21,000) and it takes your breath away when you walk out into the stadium proper. before the game everyone was milling around drinking beer & just generally enjoying the whole experience - you could sense people's anticipation & excitement. tons of people were dressed up and i know people who'd moan that the only time us english lose our inhibitions and display any kind of passion is at football (and not about God) but i don't care, i think it can be a good, godly thing. i went up to a nipper with my can of blue hairspray to ask if he wanted his hair sprayed blue but he looked a bit scared of me and said no. hearing old pensioners turn to each other and say they didn't ever think they'd see pompey at wembley was just beautiful. dave heard the best chant in the loos before the game: 'we'll be running round wembley with our willies hanging out, singing we've got bigger ones than you', to the tune (sort of) of she'll be coming round the mountain. the game was rubbish (a lack of strikers & change of formation made that inevitable) but when you're surrounded by 34,000 pompey fans & you sing you're heart out for 90 minutes (it was a few days to get my voice back properly) you don't really notice that sort of thing.
anyway, here's some pics.

maybe a hug will plug up your cry hole

2008-04-01T16:33:00.002+01:00

when i was having a shower last night i remembered quite a few years ago, when i was still at uni (so a lot more years ago than i'm happy about), my housemate and i were nursing our hangovers one saturday morning with a nice cup of tea when we decided, slightly foolishly, to make a last minute dash on the train to stockport, as we were both pompey fans and that's where our beloved boys in blue were going to spending the afternoon getting beaten. when we got into the ground it turned out half the squad had been struck down with some virus and half the team were from the youth team, meaning we weren't just beaten but hammered.

a few years later i went to watch pompey play at barnsley. at the time they had no roof on the away end, meaning the away fans were exposed to the elements. sadly it was the middle of winter, meaning the elements were especially pernicious - it was freezing, blowing a gale, and chucking it down. we'd bought a plastic poncho with a hood (for £2, the bastards) in a vain attempt to keep dry and at half time some of the more die hard, bare-chested pompey fans saw us and started singing "you've got a condom, on your head" to the tune of 'he's got the whole world in his hands'. the team got battered as much as we did, losing 2-0.

only a few short years ago portsmouth had, in the previous 5 years, the worst away record of all 92 football league clubs. i've had little joy following pompey on the road, and at times like that you wonder why you do it. but the reason we do it is that this saturday i'm going to be sat in wembley, one of the greatest stadiums in the world, watching portsmouth - humble, crappy pompey - play in the fa cup semi final, the world's greatest domestic cup competition. and even if we lose (which i'm pretty certain we will), i'm going to try and enjoy every minute of it because i remember where we've been - all those other rubbish, decrepit northern grounds watching dire portsmouth teams - and i'll think it doesn't get much better than this.

trust me, i'm a stomach

2008-03-28T17:42:00.003Z

last year was a good'un for films and i'm cockahoop that this year's had a few gems already too. one of my favourites so far is lars and the real girl (see the trailer here). now if i was to say it was a comedy about a guy having a relationship with a sex doll, you'd probably expect something purile in the vein of american pie or superbad. you would be totally wrong though. it's actually a really sweet, romantic film. i can't think of any occasion when the phrase 'i didn't know whether to laugh or cry' has been more apt. when i saw the diving bell & the butterfly the other week, i had to stay in my seat for a few minutes afterwards just because of the depth & variety of emotion i was feeling. lars and the real girl had the same effect, just with a very different spectrum of emotions. i never knew it was possible for my heart to be amused, broken & warmed all at the same time.

the film should also be required viewing for church leaders everywhere. i don't want to give anything away, but they'll be able to learn a lot about how acceptance changes people's lives.

i soaked it in the toilet to soften it up

2008-03-21T12:51:00.002Z

a couple things on atheism.

someone put a post up recently on one of the ms society's discussion boards entitled '3 cheers for atheism' (you can read it, and people's replies to it here). it kind of makes me sad that a lot of the time (most of the time maybe?) the reason people claim to be atheists is that they've had bad experiences of those who profess to have a faith, and that the church has done such a bad job of being the kinds of people we're meant to be. one of the things that i find interesting though is people often say they don't believe in God, but then will still say that he's a bastard for causing them to be ill, and while we're at it let's generally blame him for everything bad that ever happened too. if i were a cleverer man i'd probably be able to say something profound and insightful about mankind's need to find reason for everything or to feel justified & if-we-can't-blame-crap-on-something-else-&-all-suffering-really-is-just-senseless-randomness-then-isn't-life-wholly-futile-and-what's-the-point-of-it-all,-i-may-as-well-go-sit-in-a-skip-&-weep. but i only had 4 hours kip last night & i can't be arsed bothering my brain with that kind of existentialism.

anyway, with those kinds of discussions (though it was more of a ganging up than a discussion) i find it really hard not to chip in & point out when people are talking bobbins. but i know it would be easy to get into an argument that wouldn't serve to do anything but to get people's backs up, so i try to keep schtum as much as possible. though when people come up with the usual ill informed opinions like religion caused all wars, including the two world wars, even i can't resist saying i'm pretty certain they've got that one a bit wrong.

whenever i do get involved in something like that though, i try to serve the other person as much as possible & find some common ground. someone prayed for me a few years ago & had a word that i was an apologist. but i read an interesting article here by brian maclaren about traditional church leadership & the wizard of oz, in which he talks about leaders becoming apologisers rather than apologists: "Instead of defending old answers, the new kind of leader will often apologize for how inadequate they are. In modernity, you gained credibility by always being right; in postmodernity, you gain authority by admitting when you’re wrong (think of the Pope’s visit to the Middle East in early 2000) and apologizing humbly."
and there's been a few times when i've apologised to people for the church's mistakes, and said sorry if they've ever been judged or condemned or unloved by the church. and generally it's helped lessen their antagonism towards the church.

going back to the atheism thing, the guardian last saturday had an interesting, if long-winded, article about atheism here

Oh, you'll be eating ice cream...in prison. Ice cream sandwiches.

2008-03-16T16:09:00.002Z

at school, waiting to get your marks back from your homework or test results was when i first learnt the cunning ploy of lowering your expectations so as to avoid disappointment. oh how i pitied those who were convinced they were going to get a top mark, only to be left crestfallen as their overoptimism turned round and, er..made their crest fall over. or off. i on the other hand managed to not only avoid their chagrin, i also felt smug in the knowledge that i had mastered one of the great lessons in life, namely that if you don't set your expectations too high you'll avoid pain. it's been a lesson that's served me well, if only for making a trip to the cinema much more satisfying. expect a turkey and it probably won't be that bad a film. the problem with that though is that it means i can end up not really expecting much from life, or ever really hoping for much. so i'm going to start trying to raise my expectations, starting with the fa cup semi final. i think the trick though is not to just be blindly, unrealistically overoptimistic, like some sanguine, simple-minded simpleton - there's no point expecting us to batter west brom, if only for the simple reason it won't happen. but instead i'm just going to expect to make the most of our trip to wembley, to expect an experience that will have highs & lows, i'll enjoy singing myself hoarse (assuming i actually get to go), and i'll just try to savour the whole thing, an experience that not many people get to enjoy, cos who knows when it'll happen again.

laugh at death, embrace the trouser press

2008-03-06T20:47:00.004Z

- art is fun! i saw this clip here the other day which is ace.

- i was chatting with someone the other day who said what a plethora of people have said over the last few years, namely that i they were me (ie, somebody with a similarly debilitating chronic illness), they'd be so hacked off with God. the thing i find interesting is, they always say it thinking i haven't ever been. as it is, i haven't been really hacked off with God for a couple of years. not that i've ever really guilty of paroxysm - i'm hardly the most apoplectic person in the whole world. the only time i ever fulminate is when i watch deal or no deal.

- when we were at middle school (9-13), one of the things we used to graffiti our blackboards with were claims to be "skill", as in "dave is skill". then after a term or two, if anyone did this we would claim that 'skill' was a russian bum disease, and everyone would mock that person for boasting they were a russian bum disease. this person would then make a counter-claim that skill the russian bum disease was actually only spelt 'skil', with one 'l'. though seeing as no-one could really claim to be an expert in russian diseases or their correct spelling, the debate never really reached a satisfactoy conclusion. i'm not sure what made me remember that.

children are just cake eating dwarves

2008-02-22T23:01:00.007Z

-local news is arse. total bollocks! i've just been watching look north reporting on the earthquake and one of the pieces was a bloke sat next to a computer reading out emails they'd had from people saying they'd just experienced an earthquake (the first they received in the office said, 'quite simply' according to the presenter, 'EARTHQUAKE 5 MINUTES AGO'). the presenter then informed us another email was 'quite correct' in saying they'd been an earthquake. there were further emails in which people said that...wait for it...can you guess what?...the tension's building...there was an earthquake. this was followed by another piece in which people in the street, all of them pensioners, said how there'd been an earthquake and - hold on to your seat because this'll blow you away - they had felt it. i hate this dumbing down of news reporting. it's not just local news either - i never thought much of natasha kaplinski anyway as a news reader when she was on the beeb, but i lost what little respect i had when i saw the ads for her new channel 5 show. poppycock.

-i caught a bit of a programme the other day which did an experiment where they got some people to litter pick for half an hour. one group got paid £10, then a second group did it for free, and they both had to rate their enjoyment of the task. the group who were paid enjoyed it about 16%; the group who did it for nowt had an enjoyment score of about 80 or 90%. a few days later we experienced this first hand when kate did a bit of market research and we had to watch a half hour dvd of the rocky laporte show, a painfully unfunny by-the-numbers american sitcom, all for the princely sum of five english pounds. if we were doing it for free i wouldn't have been bothered that much, but getting a bit of recompense meant i then put a value on it, and i'd want to be paid a helluva lot more than that to watch it again. so i guess if you hate your job, try giving all your money away.

-i find it really rude when you're waiting at a lift or a pedestrian crossing, having already pressed the button, and someone else comes along and presses then presses the button again. it's like they're saying 'you look stupid & i don't trust you to have figured out how press a button. let me do it for you, you poor simpleton'. but then these are also the kind of people who, if the lift hasn't arrived after 30 seconds, then proceed to repeatedly press the button, presumably thinking that simple programmable machines have a tendency to apathy & need to be pestered otherwise they'll just sit around moping. simpletons.

it left me badly deformed, he said, laughing

2008-02-20T16:39:00.002Z

1)go and see the diving bell & the butterfly. i won't say what it's about, but if you do read about it, i should point out it doesn't once slip into heartstring-tugging mawkishness. it's a brilliantly imagined piece of film making.

2)i hate being a football fan sometimes. i felt more strongly over portsmouth selling benjani mwaruwari, our cuddly, lovable leading scorer, than i've felt about anything for a long time. you know that feeling you'd get when there was someone you really fancied but then you see them with someone else, and you'd a horrible feeling of longing & pain in the pit of your stomach - that's precisely how i felt on seeing him pull on a man city shirt for the first time. i had to turn the telly off cos i felt sick. the feeling was allayed slightly when i went up to bolton to see a classic case of daylight robbery (we get battered for 90 minutes, barely have a shot on goal & then go & score a blatantly offside goal 9 minutes from time). but the game only served to increase my pain & bitterness, as i obviously concluded the only reason we were rubbish was because benjani's been sold & he was the sole reason we won anything all season.
and then we get man utd away in the fa cup quarter final & there goes our best chance since 1939 of getting to a wembley final. i still might go though, because of that idiotic hope that something miraculous may happen that all football fans have.
football is not my friend.

3)it's no fun being a christian sometimes either. the english language is blessed with some meritorious words, including some most pleasing insults. so it's a shame i'm supposed to insult people, otherwise i would derive great pleasure from calling people things like 'imbecile' or 'nincompoop'.

4)we went to a networky thing at the weekend for emerging church leaders. i went mostly in the hope of talking to people to find out some new ideas on how to do church. in that respect i was disappointed, as it would appear there's nothing new in the sun & what they thought was innovative actually i'd heard before (though in their defence, i guess it's innovative in terms of they're doing outside of the support of any established church structures). but actually that was quite helpful. if there were lots of different ideas going on, we could've spent ages trying to find the right model of church to fit into, but that probably would've been a huge waste of time. now we can start working out what our values & ethos are, and concentrate on making sure we're walking those things out. which is probably totally over simplifying a complex issue, but then we're not formally leading anything so i'm not going to worry about that. though i've half a mind to start a whole new denomination where it's acceptable to insult people, but only if you use a most cromulent word.

i see lies in the eyes of flies

2008-02-11T20:02:00.000Z

whenever i use our electric toothbrush for the first time after recharging it, i always have the following 9 thoughts go through my head:

1. i love using the toothbrush when it's freshly charged, it makes me happy

2. let's be honest dan, it doesn't really make you happy does it, otherwise you wouldn't get quite so low as much.

3. and let's face it, of all the experiences in the world that could have such a lasting effect on my emotional state as to be able to say it makes me happy, a freshly charged braun oral b electric toothbrush is never really going to rank that high.

4. well if you're going to be that pedantic about it, then no, it probably doesn't really make me happy. but then isn't it true that, according to exponents of the psychology of happiness, enjoying and being thankful for the little things in life will have a positive effect on your emotional wellbeing?

5. that is indeed true. but even so, i think the best we can really say is 'i do indeed love using the toothbrush when it's freshly charged. it provides precisely 2 minutes of quite niceness. but beyond that, it has no real lasting influence on my happiness.'

6. ok.

7. i have a very quickly moving object in my mouth; i hope i don't catch the inside of my cheek on it, thereby ripping a huge & bloody hole in the side of my face.

8. actually, they probably test these things quite a lot before deeming it safe enough to allow the general public to part their hard earned cash for it. braun probably don't consider it good for business to let their products maim & disfigure their customers. it'll be ok.

9. should i be a little worried that i referred to myself as 'we' in thought 5?

so there you have a little insight into some of the things that go round my mind. honestly, i have these same thoughts every time i use the freshly charged brush.

come down and touch it, jermaine

2008-02-02T21:21:00.000Z

my old job at hsbc was occasionally stressful, & no-one especially liked it as too much of the role involved sorting out cock-ups by our colleagues in hyderabad, and sorting out a cock-up could quite often involve an Angry Customer. admittedly, it wasn't that often that often you'd ever have to speak to said Angry Customer (though it was more common to speak to the Angry Manager at the local branch of the Angry Customer, who wasn't best pleased that they were having to speak to the Angry Customer), but the fear that this could happen for something that was never your fault anyway was never much of a motivator, and people longed for a magical, heavenly time when there would never be an Angry Customer to make us feel bad.

anyway, the team that i've started back on was generally considered the cushtiest team to be on, only rivalled by the systems team, who as everyone knows do sod all apart from tell you turn your computer off & on again. and it's been very nice not coming even close to ever hearing a sound of an Angry Customer. however, i've noticed i miss certain bits of my old job, and one of those things seeing more easily the fruit of what i did. because, every now & then you'd get to speak to a Happy Customer, who was previously being a tiny bit of a Stressed Customer, but then is very grateful & relieved to hear you call up & tell them their mortgage is in their account. but with the stuff i do now, i don't really see the effects of what i'm doing. for all i know, every time i press return on my computer i'm actually causing a young child's cherished pet hamster to be blown up leaving behind a litter of week old baby hamsters.

imagine that, a fishfinger as big as a garage

2008-01-30T11:38:00.000Z

aww, the african cup of nations. i love the african cup of nations, the football's fascinating. you can have moments of the most sublime skill from some of the world's best players, then in the same game have moments of comic ineptitude as they play like schoolboys, all chasing after the ball & having no concept of how to defend. and then there's the fouls - they have have the most glorious, bone-crunching, hardman bludgeonings you'll ever see on a football pitch, as they quite blatantly try to boot another player into next week. one of the best bits about the fouls though is the player's reaction when he gets sent off, as there's always a genuine look of complete shock & innocence. it's different from the protestations of other nationalities when they get carded though - in europe, the players are more just gutted they've been sent off or, probably more commonly, they thought they made a genuine attempt for the ball & didn't really touch the other player, who has clearly conned the ref. in the african cup of nations though, it's more a case of, they know they absolutely twatted the other player, but they just think it's perfectly fair to attempt to scythe him down & boot him his hard as you can & why should trying to break his legs be a red card offence?

horses don't like jazz

2008-01-23T09:10:00.000Z

-some things i am thankful at the moment: taxis (they take me places i can't go myself); royal mail (they give me things from far away places); things that are pretty (especially for kate making the flat look nice - thanks wifey!); words (where the blazes would we be without them?); food that tastes good (see below).

-talking of taxis, sheffo taxi drivers aren't anywhere near as chatty as their london counterparts, but i still have the occasional chat with them. my favourite two conversations so far were one bloke moaning about immigrants & how the country is going to pot because of them, england was a much better place when he first moved here from jamaica back in the 60s; and another one saying, in a mildly worringly detached kind of way, how he sometimes has a fantasy inspired by his time in the army when he used rocket launchers, and he'd like to use one on some of millions of new bars that are opening up in sheffield.

-three things you must all do:
1)watch arrested development (every time i watch it constantly amazed by the creativity of it, every character is perfect. the best sitcom ever);
2)next time you cook a roast chicken, don't bin it. instead, pick off all the meat (there's always loads underneath, & don't forget the wings), then cover with water, add some raw onion, carrots & celery (the holy trinity of stock making) & some bay leaves & any herbs you want), bring it to the boil then simmer for a few hours, scimming off any scum that you may get, & otherwise enjoying the smell that'll fill you house. next day, make a delicious risotto using the stock & leftover chicken. that might all sound like a bit of a faf, but really it's not, and you'll have had the following benefits: i)a lovely roast, ii)a lovely aroma as the stock garners its fullsome flavour, iii)a lovely risotto, and iv)a lovely sense of wellbeing & oneness with the world, knowing you've got as much use as possible out of the pathetic chicken's life. in our world of haste, sometimes it's nice to be part of a long process.
3)listen to some parliament. and by parliament i don't mean some dull debate in the house of commons, but the those funky mothers led by george clinton. you'll rarely hear finer purveyors of The One, the device that makes all things funky. one of the beautiful things about parliament is they have this whole kind of pseudo-religious sci-fi philosophy of the funk. so there is the Mothership, a bit like heaven and the source of all funk; then there's Starchild, a Jesus character who's the Mothership Connection, and means we're able to get in touch with the Mothership and receive the funk; and finally there's the lucifer-esque Sir Nose D'Void of Funk - he hates the funk, and also can't swim. anyway, Starchild defeats Sir Nose by shooting him with his Bop Gun, thus turning Sir Nose funky.
It's a beautiful thing.

i don't know what's come over the boy, he's been off his kedgeree for weeks

2008-01-10T16:59:00.000Z

depending on how well you know me and/or how perceptive you are, this won't be a surprise at all, but i was hit recently by the blinding revelation that i'm not a completer/finisher. and by blinding revelation, i mean about as blinding as when you're in the cinema and the light's go up at the end. so not much blinding as, oh i can see a bit better now.
if i was to look back over this blog i'd find it strewn with posts saying things like 'i've got more to say on this scintillating topic, but i'm far too busy now & will have to finish my thoughts later, but honestly, it's worth sticking around for cos you'll be astounded by my depth of insight.' and by astounded, i mean about as astounded as seeing a mathematician prove that 2 + 2 really does equal 4.

anyway, the last such post was something about science & faith, & people thinking if science can observe & explain something then surely that disproves God, while conversely, christians can seem to want the unexplainable miraculous to prove God. i used to be like that, but i'm much more liberal these days. before christmas i enjoyed the excellent 'power of the planet' on bbc2, about the powerful formative forces at work in planet earth. there was a bit about the forming of mountains. creationists would say this happened in a day 600 years ago, while geologists could be forgiven for feeling a bit superior, believing it's a process that's gone on over millions of years. i've got no problem if that's how it happened, but as i watched it i was still in awe of the power of God, which surely is the most important thing.

and psychologists probably have a lot to say about faith & it's effects on the human psyche, again thinking it's just all in your head because they can do scans & observe what's going on in the brain. but i don't see why that has to deny 'faith' - if God made our physical bodies, then why wouldn't he make the spiritual fit hand in glove with the spiritual? but then at the risk of sounding overly spiritual, maybe this is all just continued fall-out of the fall - back then, eating from the tree of knowledge caused adam & eve to be seperated from God, & still today the more we know & understand about the universe we become increasingly secularised.

sorry frank, the jam displacement's all wrong

2007-12-31T07:58:00.000Z

it's new years eve so here's my review of 2007.

highlight: miss kate cooper becoming mrs kate cooper

lowlight: steve mclaren

best film: a toss up between 'tell no-one', a fantastic french thriller, and according to michael caine the best film he's ever seen; and 'the counterfeiters' - when you're still talking an hour after you've left the cinema about the issues raised, you know it's a good movie. an honourable mention should also go to that 5 minute continuous shot on the dunkirk beach in atonement.

worst film: either the golden compass (more proof for that most scientific of formulas, big hype = disappointing film), or evan almighty.

best cinema experience: watching ginger rogers & fred astaire dazzle in 'top hat' - the reason it was the best wasn't the dancing though, as mesmerising as it was; it was the audience - average age was probably about 70, they all applauded after the dance scenes, somebody's hearing aid starting whistling, another bloke obviously didn't have his in & would talk quite loudly, and somebody else fell asleep & started snoring.

best tv: any scene in heroes with hiro in it; charlie brooker's screen wipe (relentlessly, hilariously caustic expose of how tv works); arrested development (the best sitcom ever); any obscure documentary on bbc4.

best quote: when brazilian striker ailton, a bit of a ladies man, signed for his new club MSV Duisburg, he affirmed his intention to leave his bad boy image behind & focus on his football:
"I am here without my wife, and I'm all about football. There will be no more sex for me, no more bumbum. The only orgasm is when I score a goal. Goal bumbum. Ailton is back."

most constantly vexing thing: any trip to meadowhall.

guilty secret: i paid money to download 'ice ice baby' by vanilla ice.

most satisfying result in a 'how __ are you' type quiz: the outcome of the 'how british are you'. and how british am i? 'you are bloody British. you're at the highest level of Britishness - bloody British... its people like you that are the reason we are still called Great Britain.'

thing i learnt about me that i didn't know a year ago: at 5am each morning, regular as clockwork, i roll onto my back in my sleep, & start to snore a little.

most confusing moment: james blunt being quite amusing on top gear, and like he might be a good laugh down the pub.

the 'isn't science brilliant' award for reminding us that science isn't boring & geeky: learning that if you were to take everybody in the world & suck all the air out of all our atoms, the world's population would be the size of an apple (but still weigh the same.)

why 2008 will be bad: i'll start feeling old, cos next year's fresher's will be children of the 90's - they weren't even born when the stone roses first album came out! they won't remember the first gulf war! they won't understand that maggie is the reason we all hate the tories!
also, next summer & england not playing in euro 2008.

why 2008 will be good: not feeling the pain & disappointment of england dismally going out of euro 2008 in the quarter finals; learning to drive.

it makes me want to drill open my head & get the memories out

2007-12-20T16:18:00.000Z

one of the nice things about christmas is that you get post that isn't bills or capitol one offering you a credit card - you get christmas cards. but for the first time this year, being married has obviously suddenly qualified us to receive the most exciting christmas post of all - the christmas family newsletter, of which we've had four so far this year. so i thought i'd try my hand at writing us one. seeing as it's too late to get out in the post, i'll put it up here:

'well, 2007 is fast drawing to a close in a blaze of cosmic malapropism, and so it's time for this harbinger of news, our first ever family newletter.
the year started with a bowl of branflakes (or was it shreddies? i can't quite remember), and as i ate that first portentous mouthful of wholewheat stolidness, i knew this would be a year to remember.
the first few months were taken up planning our wedding. it was somewhen during this time that we were driving along the A61, and we almost ran over a pigeon. fortunately a last minute swerve by kate (she really is a most competent driver) saved the pathetic beast. while the mangy vermin probably deserved to die, we were just glad not to have to clean its pulverised innards from the front of the car.

anyway, to the wedding. it was nice.
some weeks after this, we were doing our weekly food shop at tesco. obviously, we do this now on a tuesday afternoon, but back then, for reasons too confusing and embarrassing to go into now, we did it on a thursday. it was a shopping trip like all the others, with most of the time spent looking at the other shoppers thinking 'die. die now.' yet as we carefully examined the receipt afterwards to check we had met our stringent 'on average less than a pound per item' criteria for determining a successful shop (which we had), we were flabbergasted to see we had apparently purchased two 'ugli' fruit. why was that so flabbergasting, i hear you ask. well quite simply, kate had never even heard of ugli fruit while it, although i had heard of them, had believed them to be entirely mythical, like sea urchins. so two or three days later (forgive me for not remembering precisely), we returned to three tesco customer service desk, where the nice people were more than happy to reimburse us.

more recently, just the other day i was in the wheelchair pushing myself up a slope when a couple young scallywags offered to help. i politely declined, and when i got home i was pleased to find kate had made some lunch, which we ate together while watchng neighbours. as the end credits rolled i gave kate a peck on the cheek as a thank you for making lunch. she sure is a nicey wifey.

as you can see, it's been a year of plenteous memorable excitement, filled with a veritable smorgasbord of happenings, encompassing the whole range of human emotional experience. join us now in having as nice cup of tea as we let these stories embrocate our lives. if 2008 is even as much as half as exciting as this year's madness, we may end up giving ourselves heart attacks!

love to you all

dan & kate'

everytime you download music, God kills a kitten

2007-12-11T19:21:00.000Z

kate saw that on a bumper sticker, which made me smile.

we watched the golden compass at the weekend, and i had to resist the temptation to burn the screen or maybe throw some jam at it. not because it's evil & no doubt responsible for the corrupting of our children's minds though, just because it wasn't a very good film. actually, it's not that bad, but no better than 3 stars - well acted & some good effects but it tried to fit too much in.

anyway, the whole anti-God controversy thing about it is kind of interesting. when i read the books it bothered me a little, but mostly because i was disappointed that what had started out as an enjoyable first book just turned into a vehicle for what i felt was philip pullman preaching at me (and how terribly hypocritical of him, seeing as he hates cs lewis' narnia books for just that reason). but i was also a bit sad that the church has given people a reason to attack it and probably hasn't got much right to complain about it, having done a good job throughout its history of misrepresenting who God is. and let's face it, the kind of things he attacks about the church are a lot of the same things we all moan about anyway. having said all that though, i think it will give some people the wrong idea about church & God, but i guess the question for 'the church' is not how to stop people watching it (which will only serve to cause more people to watch it, & then confirm to them that the church is only interested in controlling people), but how to best be his kids/friends/bride/body.

turn it off dad, it's corrupting my mind

2007-12-03T14:47:00.000Z

i've got some more thinking following on from the previous couple of posts, but i'm too busy running around in my vest & pants throwing satsumas at things to have time to write it down. but in the meantime, i laughed when i heard this about the english fella who sang the national anthems before the england v croatia game. he should have sang the line 'mila kuda si planina', meaning 'you know, my dear, how we love your mountains', but sang instead 'mila kura si planina' - a seemingly easy mistake to make, except that that can be translated as 'my dear, my penis is a mountain'.

apparently he's part flamingo

2007-11-27T22:34:00.000Z

i liked these two pictures i saw on asbo jesus, an entertaining site giving some insightful commentary about church & christianity in a lovely droll pictorial form:

my shins are melting

2007-11-18T15:59:00.000Z

cox apples - nice one God! (or, nice one evolution, depending on your opinion on the origins of life).

the bit i wrote below about healing reminded of some stuff kate's read recently about the brain, which is a properly mental bit of muscle. they (the magical 'they' in the sky) have been able to take stroke victims who have some degree of paralysis due to brain damage & re-train their brains so new neural pathways are created that bypass the damaged areas, meaning they can recover full use of their bodies. and the placebo effect, normally disregarded by the medical establishment, is starting be taken more seriously as a genuine treatment.

i saw a programme a while ago where they took a bloke whose body had a deficiency of some chemical, & they gave him what he thought was the relevant medication but was actually a placebo, and they found that his body had automatically started producing the chemical. there's been other studies where people who needed knee surgery had their knee cut open for surgery, but then nothing was done, and the patients have got better & are convinced that therefore the operation must have been carried out.
which got me thinking about faith & praying for healing - maybe prayer is kind of like a placebo, creating the conditions that allow our brains to heal ourselves. now that's not meant to undermine faith - science tends to think that if it can explain something then that means it can't be God, but i don't agree with that. all good things come from God the bible says, and being healed is definitely a good thing, so it's still God, even if it's not the miracle that we all crave as some kind of proof. as i wrote below, most biblical healing probably wasn't instantaneous anyway. and the bible says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, and isn't that part of what this is?

as another example of the power of our minds, andy mitchell told me the other day about a true story in the states where a travelling hobo jumped on a goods train, but realised too late that he'd just shut himself into a refrigerated container. so, knowing he was going to freeze to death, he decided to document what would happen to his body in the hope it might be of some use to science. sure enough, he went through all the stages of hypothermia until he died. the mad thing was, it wasn't a refrigerated container.

is that your real body?

2007-11-11T07:44:00.000Z

-i was just reading a book review (something i like doing, but seeing that written down, makes me look a bit dull), it was an account by russian arkady babchenko which contained the quote "we heal ourselves with cynicism, preserve our sanity this way...". which is about a good a summing up of cynicism as i ever heard. i can totally see that when i'm cynical about something it's because i've been hurt somehow, usually through broken promises, and being cynical is a good defence against that happening again.

-i recently wrote out all the prayers in the new testament, and one of the things that stood out was how much they included praying for strength & power & might. and it wasn't just for the obvious things that you'd think you need strength for, like overcoming & persevering - it was for things like knowing how much God loves us, for Jesus to live in our hearts, and to be able to do what pleases him. it's not something i can really remember people praying for at church.

-i was doing some reading up on the greek for 'healing' in the new testament. there's two words usually translated as heal/healed/healing, and of the 70 odd times it's used, the word used most is 'therapeuo', from which we get the word therapy. i found this bit of research by one person looking into it's use in the nt & other contemporary writings, which said that it generally wasn't a sudden, miraculous event, but was a process, dealing with the whole of the person (ie emotional, spiritual & psychological as well as physical), and involved a change of lifestyle. so not really the way it gets taught by the evangelical church, and why it's not really sat well with me when people go out on the streets to pray for healing. it's fantastic of course when people do get instantly healed, but if they don't then how do you follow up any potential pastoral issues that may be raised.

-hooray for sony. not content with giving us the wonderful bravia adverts, they've not and done this here for the walkman.

i'm receiving a transmission from david bowie's antennae nipple

2007-11-02T14:52:00.000Z

as part of sheffield's off the shelf literary festival i went to a couple writers workshops. the first one i decided to go to was called healing words. it had been a while since i bought the ticket so i couldn't really remember what it was supposed to be about, other than i thought it sounded like it could be quite interesting or useful. i certainly hadn't given a thought to the kind of demographic that a workshop like that might appeal to. now i don't mind admitting that in the past i've had a couple dreams of the sort where i think, i know, i'll not wear any trousers to work today, this is perfectly normal thing, people do it all the time so obviously lots of others will do the same and i'll be happily anonymous in the crowd, but then i get to work and, with a growing feeling of dread & regret at my general conspicuousness, realise that no-one else has done anything so preposterous, and i wake up in a bit of a cold sweat.

anyway, this feeling was somewhat approaching what i felt as i entered the room, looked round the other attendees, and quickly realised that not only was i probably the youngest there, but i was the only one there with balls.

anyway, i actually quite enjoyed it. then i also went to one about disability, which at one point looked like it was going to be a one-to-one tutorial with the fella running it, but then a couple others turned. i didn't really pick up any tips, but it was good chatting. we one of the exercises was to write a rant, which we then read out. the girl next to me very bravely read a rant at her dad, who she felt abandoned by, so i felt a bit insensitive when i read a rant at people everywhere who think they don't like fish, because they are wrong. it got a laugh though.

but then they are wrong.

what is right, however, is comedy, and laughing. the peter serafinowicz show has tickled me lots, the armstrong & miller show made a promising start last friday ('dad, why did you & mummy get divorce?' 'well son, it was your fault'), dave is my new best friend (channel 19 on freeview - endless repeats of QI, have i got news for you, i'm alan partridge, and the mighty boosh), and talking of the mighty boosh, series 3 starts in a couple weeks, and we're off to see bill bailey at the arena on the 14th. let us rejoice.

you're thinking i have a false lip, aren't you

2007-10-23T14:22:00.000+01:00

hooray for those advertising types at sony bravia, bringing us a minute of ineffable joy into the otherwise fetid crap of commercial breaks.

first there was the mesmerising bouncing balls here, then the exploding paint on a run down estate giving us a picture of heaven here, and now, thanks to 40 animators, 3.5 tons of clay & 3 weeks work, they give us this slice of fun here.

and they're all the more impressive for knowing they're not cgi'd.

it's impossible for beards to get cold. science has proved it.

2007-10-17T11:53:00.000+01:00

when i lived on my own, having let my circumstance sequester myself from living life in all its fullness like obviously everyone else does, a lot of the time i would feel in a pretty deep funk (an ironic term if ever there was one). so in the manner i've learnt over years of practice, i would do my best to obviate these feelings of loneliness and depression by filling my time with stuff. but not just any kind of stuff - it would have to be things that would placate my thoughts & feelings as much as possible, and would almost invariably involve the tv. i could have read a book, or done something more creative, or spent some concious time with God, but the problem with that is that there'd be no external noise that would drown out the silence of my own isolation, and would have confronted me with everything crap i was feeling. it wasn't really a problem during the day, but would always happen if no-one was around in the evening.

but one night a few weeks ago kate was out for the evening, and i noticed i was quite happy for the tv to stay off, for there to be quiet, because i knew that, though i was alone, i wasn't lonely, because my spouse would be coming back to me. which i thought was interesting, and wondered if that's not a bit of an analogy how we can be with God. i remember reading a book a while ago that had a bit about how people often avoid solitude for fear of confronting themselves with their own loneliness, which is precisely what i was doing. but then we don't need to feel lonely, because Jesus, our future spouse, is coming back. so i suppose that kind of proves that kate is actually Jesus. which is nice.

do that again & i'll come at you, likie a flannel.

2007-10-06T13:41:00.000+01:00

-i saw an advert in the phonebook the other day for a dry cleaners, whose slogan was 'we're probably the most reasonable prices in sheffield', which is about as blandly temperate a slogan i've seen. i wonder what other options they rejected before plumping for that one: 'hopefully you'll not regret choosing us'; 'we very much doubt we're the worst'; 'it's a fair bet we'll be more than adequate'; 'in all likelihood we'll be quite good'; 'chances are we're at least as good as the competition'.

-i quite often wheel myself round past the station to get some exercise. the slope up alongside the waterfall, while not steep for a walker, takes an awful lot more effort when you've only got your arms to propel yourself & a not-too-lightweight nhs wheelchair. while i like the workout this gives me, it no doubt looks like i'm struggling a bit, and on a handful of occasions people have offered to give me a hand up. but only on one occasion has help been offered by an englishman, which is a bit of a sad reflection on british society.

-here is a bad joke: what do you call cheese that isn't yours?
nachos cheese.

death to the gram, most heinous of measures

2007-10-01T14:49:00.000+01:00

here are some things i have been watching recently:

-charlie brooker's screen wipe, back for a new series on bbc4 on tuesday nights at 10. imagine harry hill's tv burp, only much more caustic. not for the easily offended. but if you find you go temporarily deaf at the utterance of a rude word, try tuning in an hour earlier and catch ripping yarns, what michael palin & terry jones did after monty python. as the title suggests, it's a series of ripping yarns, albeit shot through with a thread of surrealism.
-QI, also back for a new series on friday nights. the world is more cuddly, sesquipedalian place when steven fry's on our screens.
-heroes of course. if only there were more people in the world like hiro, we would all be much more smiley.

we've just made a cd of various songs from the wedding, which reminded me of a list of songs i thought we could have had for the exit of the bride & groom. here are some that didn't make the grade:
'bat out of hell', by meatloaf
'wind beneath my wings', by bette midler (but the version version from peter kay's phoenix nights, where brian potter sings 'wind beneath my wheels')
'hello, is it me you're looking for', by lionel ritchie
'total eclipse of the heart' by bonnie tyler
'every rose has its thorn', by poison
'i wanna know what love is' by foreigner
'mr loverman', shabba ranks
'welcome to the jungle', by guns'n'roses
'ace of spades', by motorhead
'i would do anything for love (but i won't do that)', by meatloaf again

he was so boring that time exploded

2007-09-22T02:38:00.000+01:00

i've not posted anything for a while, for the simple reason NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. which isn't true of course - lots of things have happened, like i dropped my phone down the toilet, i thought virgin sent me my new phone for free, but then they sent me one that wasn't free and wanted the free one back, i went to the cinema (to see superbad. it was quite funny, but very filthy), i went on an e-vac chair at work (a very exciting contraption for getting me down stairs at work when there's a fire alarm. it glides. i'd feel proper clever if i invented it), i've had my first cox apple of the season, an apple generally considered to be one of God's finest inventions. so things HAVE HAPPENED. just nothing to merit a blog post. which, mildly ironically, has merited this blog post. though 'merited' is too strong a word. it's just a stupid hour of the night and i'm still awake and i'm bored.

sometimes when i'm driving past people and i see someone walking along, usually on their own, i sometimes get the urge to wind down the window, lean out of it, and shout something a bit insulting at them, but in a very not-personal or hurtful kind of way. something like 'HIPPIE'. or maybe a confusing and/or menacing command of some kind, like 'FOR PITY'S SAKE, PLEASE STOP IT', or 'RUN AWAY. OR ELSE'. i'm quite tempted to go do it right now in just my boxers and a tshirt and harangue returning students..... actually i think i'll watch an episode of the west wing instead, and maybe eat a grape.

like all jugglers, he lived with a constant feeling of despair

2007-09-10T22:06:00.000+01:00

i'd love to be able to kick a football again. i really miss it, that feeling when you make a perfect connection & it feels like you barely touched the ball but it flies like you've got a foot like a traction engine.
who knows when that'll happen again, but at least it'll happen in heaven. kate asked me who else would be in heaven's team, & this is the team we came up with.

jesus would, of course, be in goal, for the obvious reason that he saves. plus he's no. 1.
it's traditional in the english game for your centre halves to be a couple of big, solid players, so that man mountain samson would be in there, alongside peter, for he is a rock.
for the full backs, you want people who are competent & reliable defenders, so we thought jonathan (who defended david) & stephen (who defended the faith) would do a good job. nehemiah would be good to have on the subs bench in case there are any injuries or they let in too many goals, as he made his name shoring up a leaky defence.

then david would be in the middle of the park. what with his experience as a lion-fighting shepherd, and his ruddy complexion, you know he'd extremely fit, tough tackling, the engine of the team, and with his leadership skills he's obvious choice for captain.
alongside him you'd want a visionary playmaker. so john, the author of revelation, obviously has great vision, & would be the kind of person who could pick out a 40 yard pass.

philip would play down one of the wings - being able to run alongside a chariot he's obviously going to be quick.
football is littered with players like george best, gazza, beckham, who start out with bags of talent, but end up getting distracted by the trappings of success, money & the women. solomon is the obvious choice for heaven's eleven, and would play down the other flank.

then there's the strikers. john the baptist could be good - after paving the way for Jesus, he'd be a good foil for the other striker, setting them up. but he also has a tendency to lose his head, so he'd start on the bench. instead, there'd be a young joseph - with his fancy coat he'll have a lot of flair, and his cocky arrogance that wound up his brothers so much would presumably do the same against opposition defenders. the other striker would be joshua. he stayed at the tabernacle, where the glory of the lord was, so he'd be the archetypal 6 yard striker - always staying on the 6 yard box cos that's where the glory is. he was also good at bringing down defences.

i'm sorry, i was momentarily confused by a plant

2007-09-02T21:31:00.000+01:00

-as a 30 year old man, i've come to accept there are certain feelings i'm not going to experience - wanting to watch friends, pride & joy at winning the oscar for best actress, excitement at news that a new avril lavigne album is coming out etc. now i would have thought it a fairly safe bet to include in with all of these the feeling of wanting to mother a mildly rotund japanese geek, but this is the very same feeling i have when i watch heroes and the obvious best character, hiro. it's his childlike enthusiasm, innocence, & wide-eyed awe at being able to bend space & time (coupled with the look of constipation as he does it) that gets me every time.

-i saw my first fred astaire & ginger rogers film at the showroom last week. it was quite a unique experience, and as we took our seats at the back & were presented with a sea of grey haired or bald heads, it was obvious this wasn't your normal crowd of cinema goers. everybody clapped after the dance routines; somebody snored for a bit. normally i'd be annoyed at somebody talking fairly loudly during a film, but when it's just an old fella who probably hasn't got his hearing aid in, it's actually a bit sweet.
as for the film itself, i enjoyed it, which isn't surprising - i love the clever rhythms & off-beats of the rapping of some hip hop, so the rhythms of the tap dancing was fantastic, while the choreography of the fight scenes in martial arts films that mesmerise me so much has a natural ancestor in the choreography of the big song & dance routines.

-bruce parry is back on our screens. let us rejoice. i've written before about tribe, and it never fails to fascinate & amuse, like with the amazonian tribesman saying they didn't know what to do with soap when it was introduced by people from the cities, but then they thought those people smelled bad anyway. at first i always think their lives must be so hard, but they always seem to be happy, and don't like the modern world changing things.
i'd like to be friends with bruce. he'd be great fun on a night out cos he'd probably do anything you dared him to, like he's always game for whatever initiation ceremonies the tribe put him through. and you'd feel pretty safe with him too, he could probably kill anybody who threatened you cos he used to be in the marines.
i can't imagine him actually killing anyone though, he's far too affable. the world would be a much nicer place if all the soldiers of all the world's armies were like bruce. they'd turn up some place, try & kill the locals, cock it up, fall around laughing at themselves, then win the affection & respect of the locals, and everyone would go home as friends & the women would cry, thinking they would have made good husbands.

to my lasting shame i stole a live dolphin to use as a bong

2007-08-27T11:32:00.000+01:00

-as i don't like the idea of being dependent on something, i rarely drink caffeinated drinks. but this means i'm obviously much more sensitive to the effects of the drug when i do have it, and so yesterday when i planned to have a nice relaxing coffee sat by the fountains outside the station while reading the paper, my head actually went a bit mental instead, and as i wheeled myself home my head was thinking things along the lines of "ISN'TEVERYTHINGBEAUTIFULIWANTTOPHOTOGRAPHEVERYTHINGLOOK ATTHELIGHTREFLECTINGINTHEWATERISN'TITBEAUTIFULLOOKATHATTREE ILOVEITAAAAAHHHHHHLET'SGOTOINDIAANDWALKAROUNDTHEMARKETS
ANDBEIMMERSEDINANOTHERCULTUREANDEATTHELOCALFOODIMAGINETH
EFLAVOURSIT'DBEAMAZINGAAAAHHHHH"
part of me was tempted to drink coffee all the time just for the constant adrenaline rush, but i know it'd probably kill me before i was 40, a bit like those spiders the cia tested speed on, that went a bit hyper then dropped dead.

-meanwhile, i started working again a couple weeks ago. so far it's going ok - a bit tiring of course but i'm getting used to it. and for the first time in nearly 3 years i can now share with the majority of the working population that feeling of waking up in the morning and thinking i don't want to go to work today. but bank holidays now mean something again, which is nice.

i thawed myself out using the heat stored in my moustache

2007-08-22T12:25:00.000+01:00

a few of us decided to do some bible-y study type stuff recently (called Team Bible - Heck Yeah!). the first time we met up we were looking at the beginning of john, which included the little bit about john the baptist preparing the way in the desert & making straight paths. we talked a bit about making straight paths for others who have all kinds of hang-ups about God & church & stuff, and i felt quite pleased as i'd done this for someone a couple weeks ago.

somebody had a post up on one of the ms society's discussion boards about how they were christian but was struggling with his fiance with the whole sex before marriage deal, and wondered what people thought. i put up my thoughts, to which somebody replied, anonymously, saying don't make us laugh, you christians are an odd bunch, rarely practising what you believed, you're only good at starting wars etc etc.

after i'd come down from the joy of rejoicing in my new-found persecution, i resisted the urge to get defensive & start an argument, but while i did point out the flaws in a couple of their points, i simply repented of the hypocrisy of a lot of christians, and also repented if they were ever hurt or judged by those in the church.

over the course of a couple more messages, the person completely softened their tone. it turned out it was a lady whose ex-husband was a christian but treated her badly, safe in the belief he'd be forgiven come church on sunday. i again repented to her for that, saying that that wasn't what forgiveness was supposed to be about. it was interesting though that as her path was being straightened, jesus was already kind of there, as she said in one message 'i guess all we can do is treat others the way we'd have them treat us'. she was mildly amused when i told her that was how jesus summed up the whole of scripture.