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…

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.

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.

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.

A simple and very beautiful quote I came across while idly glancing through a book on holiday last week. Haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

Just returned from a very peaceful week's holiday in East Anglia. I'm finding it quite hard to get back to working, and so far have only been good for answering a few urgent emails and posting pictures taken during the week to Flickr.

We stayed in the house my grandparents owned in Lowestoft, on the furthermost tip of East Anglia, inherited by my mother. I spent my earliest years in Lowestoft, and it will always be a special place for me, nearly every street and park evoking childhood memories. Visiting it is a bit like walking into myself. Unfortunately it's become a rather shabby old town since its primary industry, fishing, declined a few decades ago. The dear old place desperately needs some love, and some efforts have been made in recent years to restore its seafront, whose genteel Victorian architecture and gardens retain a memory of its former status as a popular holiday resort.

Lowestoft may have seen better days, but I was reminded again that East Anglia really is a lovely part of England. We managed to get to Beccles, Southwold, Cambridge and Norwich, ancient towns and cities whose centres still manifest their medieval, and in some cases Saxon, origins. We both fell in love with Norwich during the final day of the holiday, Kate for the first time. It's hard to believe, but there are 39 medieval churches in the city centre.

It was also great to visit my friends, and now Kate's, Mark and Katy Tattum-Smith, who moved from Edinburgh to Suffolk a few years ago. They live in a fascinating little village deep in the Anglian countryside that is straight out of Jane Austen: huge medieval church, pastel coloured cottages, a pub and a rectory, and a country house set in huge landscaped grounds, with follies. It's just one of dozens of similar hamlets dotted around Suffolk. We also caught up with other old Edinburgh friends, Nick and Esther Clarke, who were visiting Katy and Mark.

I return with the usual resolution not to allow my life to become swallowed by work, which I've conscientiously observed thus far. Will do two or three hours now, then a visit to the coffee shop is in order, I think.

Kate and I have been hooked, quite hopelessly, for at least the past three series. It really is a very funny, entertaining programme. I’m glad that they don’t seem to have changed the formula the slightest bit for the new series. It started, as always, with an cacophany of soundbites from the candidates, which did not disappoint. One I haven’t heard before: ‘Being successful is more important than being popular. You don’t need to make friends on the way up when you’re not coming back down.’ So good that I watched the first five minutes of the show again on the BBC iPlayer just to make sure I heard it aright the first time.

Just before the programme started I’d been watching an item on Channel 4 News about a group of earnest, idealistic campaigners for global economic justice who were organising a (peaceful) protest to be staged outside the G20 summit that’s taking place in London in the next few days. They were arguing, quite reasonably I thought, that the recession presents an opportunity for the developed world to reflect upon and reconsider the fundamental workings of the global economic system. Should there be such faith in the benefits of untrammelled economic growth? Should we all be working such long hours? Should we seek to narrow huge inequalities of wealth? Shouldn’t growth be environmentally sustainable? In short, the argument went, a kinder, gentler world is within our grasp if we really want it.

Watching The Apprentice is a sober reminder why this new world would be so desparately hard to realise. The show’s candidates and business gurus inhabit and exhibit an utterly different world and worldview from that of the protestors. They are accepting, indeed enthusiastic, of the way the world works, and just want to get on and master the means it offers of making money. They are pragmatic, uninterested in ideas, abstractions, and utopias, wanting the good things of this life, and quickly. They are not too concerned about precisely what it is that they are selling, so long as its profitable. The arts and ‘culture’ are viewed with a degree of suspicion, as luxuries that should be on the peripheries of life, so as not to distract from the more important business of business.

As a rather hopeless idealist myself - although certainly not a stranger to selfishness and wanting things I don’t need - I find this hard-headed materialist view of life quite hard to comprehend, and even to present without a degree of squeamishness. But it’s clear to me that the Apprentice candidates are not bad people. Most of them have always struck me as perfectly decent, and in many cases witty and charming. It’s the intense, impatient desire for concrete, material things, and lots of them, that I can’t get my head around.

I wonder how the Apprentice candidates would fare in a world designed by the high-minded folks in the Channel 4 News report. Restless, probably, frustrated by the requirement to moderate their actions and desires to harmonise with fussy notions of a common good. Impatient with perceived restrictions on their freedom to take what they want from life. I’m not sure whether there are more realists in the world than idealists, but there are certainly enough of them to make it very, very difficult to think how a more altruistic economic system than the one we’ve got is going to rise from the ashes of the credit crunch…

It's cold again now, but we had beautiful weather, certainly for March, for several days last week. A few pics from the hills around Stow, a couple of minutes drive up the road from our house.

As one of the articles puts it: ‘The book’s peak sales days on Amazon seem to correspond to major events in the attempted rescue of the economy, including the bailout of Northern Rock, the US decision to buy shares in nine major banks, and the passing of Obama’s stimulus bill. The Ayn Rand Centre for Individual Rights claims that US-wide sales almost tripled over the first seven weeks of 2009, compared with the same period in 2008.’

Atlas Shrugged, along with Rand’s other 1000 page doorstop, The Fountainhead, expresses her philosophy of ‘Objectivism’, ‘the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute’.

According to Rand altruism is evil, working against the dignity of the individual. An authentic life consists in making one’s own way in the world with as little assistance from others as possible. There should be no state welfare, and an unfettered free market, with consequent inequalities a just and accurate reflection of each person’s worth.

Economic growth and cultural development is driven by a small number of entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists and artists, on whom the rest of society is totally dependent. ‘Atlas Shrugged’ imagines the collapse of civilisation following the decision of leading capitalists to break away from the parasitical majority, and retreat to a camp in the mountains of Colorado, protected by a special holographic shield.

Clearly, Rand subscribes to the ‘Great Men’ theory of history, attributing civilisation’s development to the efforts of a relatively small number of geniuses. This worldview, or something very like it, lay behind the belief, somewhat less fashionable now than a few months ago, that a few executives and traders drive the success of their companies, and should be fabulously rewarded for their critical contributions.

According to pieces in The Guardian, the fall of banks and corporations adhering to this philosophy doesn’t seem to have disturbed the faith of Rand’s followers. Unhappy about the US Government’s bailout packages, ‘In cities around the US, conservative activists have been organising street protests known as “tea parties”, inspired by the CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli, who in a high-profile rant last month called for direct action by taxpayers in the manner of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, the anti-British protest that helped trigger the American revolution.’

The Guardian quotes Republican congressman John Campbell, one of those who opposed the Obama administration’s rescue package: ‘People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged’. The achievers are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs₀ who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.’

The results of a 1991 survey by the American Library of Congress suggested that Atlas Shrugged was ‘the most influential book on American lives after the Bible’, selling more than 6 million copies in the US at a rate of about 130,000 a year.

I had no idea the book was so popular in the States - it has minor cult status here in the UK - and as something of a bleeding heart liberal, find it all rather disturbing.

I have to admit that there is something compelling in the central strand of Rand’s thought. One does attain a sense of self-worth and dignity by seeking to take responsibility for one’s own actions, and taking the initiative to create rather than always enjoy what others have done.

But, very briefly, I think that Rand’s philosophy grossly underestimates the extent to which our own achievements depend upon the prior efforts of others. I, for example, might take pride in a website I’ve built. But to create it I needed tools developed by countless clever people on the other side of the world writing software code I couldn’t hope to understand. I needed a client to set the parameters of the project and provide guidance. I needed electricity for my computer. I needed clean water and teabags for the endless cups of tea required to get through it. The web of interdependence is endless.

It seems to me that any attempt to realise Ayn Rand’s vision would lead to hell on Earth. But her books have had a deep impact on many of her readers - just look at the reviews on Amazon, for example. I can’t see myself ever being convinced by what Rand says, and I have a feeling all this was expressed earlier and much better by Nietzsche, but I’m intrigued enough to be seriously considering having a look at one of her books. Has anybody else who stops by this blog given it a go? And is it worth the effort?

After years of not once looking at it, I now find it to be the perfect way of getting through a late night work crisis. The formula is: 20 minutes of work, then five minutes search on YouTube for a video of an old half-remembered pop video or clip from a comedy programme. It really is remarkable: it is very rare that I can’t find what I’m looking for.

The song above always makes my smile, and not only because it is ludicrous. The Goombay Dance Band, a very poor man’s Boney M, topped the UK charts with ‘Seven Tears’ back in 1981. The lyrics are as frightful as one could hope for:

Here I stand, head in hand
Lonely, like a stranger on the shore
I can’t stand this feeling anymore
Day by day, this world’s all grey
And if dreams were eagles I would fly
But they ain’t and that’s the reason why.

If that isn’t momentous enough, it is also the fifth anniversary of the creation of my little web design studio, which first surfaced, with its back to the sunlight, on 15 March 2004. I am proud that, so far as I know, I am the only person to deliberately time the founding of a company to coincide with an anniversary of the death of Caesar.

I am marking the occasion by having an extra half-spoonful of sugar in my late evening cup of tea, and four, rather than the customary three, Rich Tea biscuits to accompany it.

I’m biased, but anybody who doubts the potential or appropriateness of the web as a medium for church communities should take a look: the entries are be very good indeed.

Kate contributed to last year’s, but was too busy this time round. I thought it would be interesting to contribute to this one, the requirement to make a regular contribution to the blog forcing me to break off from work, which as my previous posts have intimated (in increasingly robust terms) has been somewhat overwhelming this year.

When I was queueing in HMV the other day I noticed that my first contribution wouldn’t be out of place in the Heavy Metal section. The second is a light-hearted evocation of desert solitude (pictured above).