http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/ en j@justinreynolds.co.uk 2009-07-24T20:48:00+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/i_shall_return_anon/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/i_shall_return_anon/#When:20:48:00Z 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… 2009-07-24T20:48:00+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/well_done_wife_and_thanks_to_all/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/well_done_wife_and_thanks_to_all/#When:08:15:58Z 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. 2009-06-17T08:15:58+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/a_little_tribute_to_sir_edward/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/a_little_tribute_to_sir_edward/#When:21:42:30Z 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. 2009-04-22T21:42:30+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/a_n_wilson_and_christianity/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/a_n_wilson_and_christianity/#When:20:57:36Z 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. 2009-04-21T20:57:36+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/april_blossom/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/april_blossom/#When:22:02:24Z 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. 2009-04-20T22:02:24+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/rooted_in_the_sky/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/rooted_in_the_sky/#When:17:59:40Z ’It is the light continuously falling from heaven which alone gives a tree the energy to send powerful roots deep into the earth. The tree is really rooted in the sky.’ Human Personality, Simone Weil. 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. 2009-04-13T17:59:40+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/good_friday/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/good_friday/#When:10:23:04Z This is on the Scottish Episcopal Church Beauty from Chaos Lent blog, but since I don’t have anything else to post on Change and Decay this week thought I’d publish it here as well. 2009-04-10T10:23:04+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/an_east_anglian_interlude/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/an_east_anglian_interlude/#When:08:31:28Z Previous Next 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. 2009-04-07T08:31:28+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/melancholy_reflections_on_the_apprentice/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/melancholy_reflections_on_the_apprentice/#When:22:57:20Z It’s that time of year again. Lent? No. The first episode of the new series of The Apprentice. 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… 2009-03-26T22:57:20+00:00 http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/the_best_sad_song_of_all_time/ http://www.changeanddecayinallaroundisee.com/index.php/entry/the_best_sad_song_of_all_time/#When:23:36:31Z Well perhaps. I realise there’s a lot of competition. But this is my candidate (for now at least). Just four or five chords but it gets me every time. Jackson C. Frank only released one album, in 1965, but it featured a handful of songs that have been folk standards ever since. The ultimate in early hours bedsit misery. Also try his tune Milk and Honey, if you can face it. 2009-03-25T23:36:31+00:00