Friday 24 July 2009, 8:48PM
I shall return, anon
It’s been rather quiet here again of late. I enjoyed setting up this blog and running it for a while, but I think it’s run out of steam in its present format. I’d like to continue to blog, but in a somewhat different way, perhaps focusing more on design, rather than posts being totally open ended. That’s not to say that there won’t be anymore of the random nonsense to which I’m prone.
I’ve just started on a project which is going to take nearly all of my time over the next few months, but after that I hope to redesign my company website and incorporate this blog into it. In the meantime I’ll be twittering every now and again…
Wednesday 17 June 2009, 8:15AM
Well done wife, and thanks to all
It has been a rather exhausting and anxious couple of months here, but with a very happy outcome: my wife Kate heard last week that she has made it through the Scottish selection panel for ordination to the Scottish Episcopal Church.
Kate has alluded to it on her blog, and will be writing about it shortly. I’d like to say thank you to all who have provided support and advice to her over through the selection process, and prior to that, when she was trying to discern whether or not this was the right move.
It’s not quite over yet: she has to attend another selection weekend in England in the next couple of months or so, but I understand that the great majority of those who are recommended by the Scottish panel get through England as well. The whole thing is very exciting: we both love the Church and the message it bears, and I’m looking forward to supporting Kate in whatever form her ministry takes.
I realise this blog has been silent of late. With the selection process in the background, and a very heavy web design workload, with a dash to complete a slew of projects before taxes are due in July, I’ve been preoccupied and haven’t had much to say. I want to keep blogging, but am thinking about taking it in another direction, wrapping it into a revised version of my Lucent Web Design site and making it more design orientated (though still with the occasional personal post).
Anyway, will give that more thought when time allows. In the meantime, thanks again.
Update: Kate has now written a post about it.
Wednesday 22 April 2009, 9:42PM
A little tribute to Sir Edward
Elgar with bicycle 'Sunbeam', 1903.
After a long day of meetings, coming home to the dismal news of the Budget, and the realisation that the Tories are almost certainly going to form the next Government, I was cheered when sitting down at the computer to check emails to switch on the radio and remember that Elgar is the current Radio 3 Composer of the Week.
With the encomium to A N Wilson that was my previous post, I realise the blog this week has become something of a celebration of British ‘chaps’. But I love everything about dear old Sir Edward (not least the great pic above).
Unfortunately he’s rather associated in the public mind with his splendidly named ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ marches, the best known of which was paired with the unsubtle lyric ‘Land of Hope of Glory’, and rounds off the Last Night of the Proms. I will always remember Kate’s face when she first saw this unbrideled, and somewhat nuts, yearly display of unrestrained British patriotism, particularly all the bobbing up and down. (I hasten to say that although it’s not quite my cup of tea, I’m not one of those so embarrassed by it that they call for it to be replaced with something else - no doubt anodyne.)
As it happens I think the marches are good fun, with some great tunes. But there’s much, much, much, much more to Elgar than that. Listening to this week’s Composer of the Week programmes I’m reminded of just how sad and lovely so much of his music is. The word ‘elegiac’ could have been invented just for it. It’s all long shadows on late summer evenings, deckchairs left out in the rain, seaside towns out of season, and memories of early childhood. Primarily the latter. I was glad that they played a generous portion of his ‘Wand of Youth’ suite, written quite late in his life, and the most haunting musical evocation of and yearning for childhood I’ve ever heard. I’m pretty nostalgic now, and I dread to think what I’ll be like when I play this when I’m old.
They’ve also played quite a bit from the ‘Enigma Variations’, including the fabulous opening movement, and ‘Nimrod’. Heard it a million times, but I always have to stop what I’m doing and just give in and listen to it all the way through.
His setting of Newman’s poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ has also been featured. As one reviewer has noted, the chorus of demons has a tendency to sound a bit middle class, but it’s awe inspiring stuff. As Kate mentioned in one of her blog posts it’s on at the Edinburgh International Festival this year, and we’ve got tickets. Can’t wait.
Tuesday 21 April 2009, 8:57PM
A N Wilson and Christianity
'Doubting Thomas' by Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308
The other day Kate pointed me in the direction of one of the best little essays I’ve read on Christianity for a long time. In Why I believe again, available on the New Statesman website, the writer A N Wilson explains why he has embraced the Christian faith again, after a decade or so of militant atheism.
He’s one of those quintessentially English figures who over the years has become something of a national treasure: unashameably middle class, highly erudite, a profilic writer, good on the radio and TV, and possessed of a sense of humour informed by a strong sense of the absurd. A bit like Alan Bennett, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, and the late Iris Murdoch and Peter Cook.
What I love about A N Wilson is his intellectual curiosity, honesty and humility. As a young man he was a Christian of the sceptical variety, enrolling at a theological training college only to drop out after a few weeks, realising that his faith was insufficiently strong to justify a call to ministry. He wrote a little book called How can we know?, a tentative, appealing defence of the reasonableness of Christianity.
As he recounts in his New Statesman piece Wilson experienced something of a ‘Damascene conversion’ to atheism in the early 1990s. He’s characteristically foggy about the precise reasons why, but puts it down, in part, to irritation with the robust tone of apologists like C S Lewis. (I’m glad to read that there’s someone else who finds Lewis’ apologetics somewhat annoying. I’ve never quite understood the popularity of Lewis’ bluff and blokeish Mere Christianity, with its - I think - simplistic ‘mad, bad or God’ knock-down style of argument. Give me the brilliant Lewis of A Grief Observed over that anyday.)
During his years outside the fold Wilson wrote a couple of books that drew on scholars like Geza Vermes and E P Sanders to question the historicity of the Gospel accounts. I remember at the time that Jesus and Paul: The Mind of the Apostle were rubbished by Christian academics like Tom Wright and Luke Johnson. But whatever the value of their arguments, the books were beautifully written, bringing a novelist’s eye to their evocation of the ancient world.
After that he wrote a series of books on the Victorians, which in retrospect showed him feeling his way back towards belief. I’ve only read one (the others are definitely on my list): God’s Funeral, a fascinating, sympathetic study of the struggles of eminent Victorians and Edwardians like Tennyson, Ruskin, Hardy, Arnold and Carlyle to hold on to God in the newly hostile intellectual climate shaped by 19th century Biblical scholarship, Darwin, and the development of geological science. The melancholy roar of the withdrawing ‘sea of faith’ and all that.
As Wilson puts it, he’s come back to Christianity because of a persistent sense that a materialist view of life just cannot account for our pull towards the transcendent, the deep sense that life points beyond itself to God. He says: “When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.” The Christian story makes sense of life like nothing else: “As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.”
Anyway, that’s enough from me: I refer you to Why I believe again. And if you’ve got time it’s also worth having a look at Wilson’s interview with Rowan Williams about the Archbishop’s recent book on Dostoevsky.
Monday 20 April 2009, 10:02PM
April blossom
There’s a tree in our garden that’s very pretty, for about a week. It started to blossom a few days ago, but the white will be completely obscured by green in a couple of days. Fortunately we’ve had beautiful weather to enjoy it.
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