Reflecting on a link

I've been thinking about the most recent of the Letters from the Past, in which my father introduces the subject of the bomb dropped two days previously on Hiroshima. Two things struck me simultaneously: the fact that the bomb took fifth place, coming after my mother's health (she was only seven weeks off having me), the weather, the imminent demobilisation of a teacher colleague and the possible timing of his own; and the statement that he finds the news of this bomb "extremely depressing" - even though it will shorten the war and his own incarceration in the RAF.

It also interests me that he should be so ready to link the invention and use of such a weapon with the tenets of conventional religious belief - and saddens me that I never thought of discussing such matters with him. I was, of course, too young, too selfishly caught up in my own life, too ignorant of politics, religion or indeed practically anything at all serious - too much of a child, even at the age of 32, to talk to him about anything that mattered. (He died when I was 32.) I now like to think that he would have approved of my activities in the '80s, marching with CND, making speeches, appearing on radio and several TV programmes, and that his assertion that I had "thrown reason out of the window" when I told him that I intended to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church after rejecting religion for the previous ten years would have been tempered by the struggles I had with that same church over my political activities.

Putting these letters online has been a fascinating experience, and the letters of August 1945 are the ones that inspired me to do it in the first place. Often I catch myself thinking they have been written to me - and then I see a speculative reference to my as yet unborn self and smile. But primarily their interest to others will lie in the authentic voice of a highly articulate and educated man of the time, expressing casually but succinctly what must have been in the minds of many like him. They come to an end in just over a month's time. I shall miss him...

Grey day transfigured

Holy Trinity church
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

It's a grey morning. I'm already damp because my umbrella was in the car and I had to fight my way down the drooping garden so my legs are uncomfortable and I'm already chilled. As we swish up the back streets of Dunoon to church, I wonder what I'm doing. My mood matches the day; most of my summer activities are over; the sun has gone. I'd have been better staying in bed with a book. The organist seems in no better fettle, and I forgot to tell him we are supposed to be keeping the Transfiguration, so we don't really speak. Besides, we're a bit late.

There is no heating in church - it is, after all, summer - as I sort out hymnbook and liturgy (thank God - not the Grey Book). There are also no children, as the Rector is on holiday and has taken Mrs Rector who does the Godly play at the back of the church. Apart from some scraping and banging from the rear, later revealed as "sorting the electrics for the coffee", it is relatively quiet as the organ music begins. I recognise the music after the opening, drifting notes: the organist is improvising on a modern/traditional scottish folk tune. It is absolutely, heart-rendingly beautiful.

I am plainly not alone in thinking this. I hear a whisper from somewhere behind me: Ohhh - that's lovely. And a stillness falls on the people, even those who are still arriving. Prayer is suddenly possible, distraction and restlessness quietened by the lilting line, and I am glad I have come. Even when the music enters a dark, sombre place it seems entirely appropriate (I subsequently learn that the organist was distracted by the thundering down the aisle of Someone on A Mission and had to go where a wrong note took him) and the melody emerges, intact and serene, just in time for the final quiet cadence.

I am now in a place where anything can happen; the gloom has been dispelled and the transfiguration is possible. And reflecting on the experience, and the prayers and farewells and greeting of long-missed friends that took place when the Mass was over, I note that we need this variety. We need joy and noise and exuberance, and we need silence and mystery.

And somehow, in the profound silence, there is music at the very heart of things.

An hour in the past

I spent a joyfully sinful hour this morning catching up, appropriately enough, on The Hour, on iPlayer. I don't know why it should have felt so wicked - Presbyterian upbringing to the fore again, I think - but the combination of wonderful sound (on my iMac) and increasing involvement with this new drama was indeed a joy. But after I'd put it all to sleep and headed downstairs, I found myself somehow still immersed in the sounds and sights of my childhood - for when men wore braces and waistcoats and hats as a matter of course and everyone smoked, I was becoming sentient and this was the world that left the lasting impression.

So what was so different? I can't describe it all, but what about a list? So ...
dingy wallpaper, tending to dark colours; green paint to shoulder-height on office/school corridors; stockings and suspenders (on women, I mean - and hideously uncomfortable this skinny 15 year old found them, before the advent of the truly stretchy nylon whose generic name I forget); dim lights; fog; Humbers and Rovers for the better-off drivers, with the rear door handle at the front of the door; tiny- screened TVs in huge wooden cases (and only one of these in our close in Hyndland for the Coronation); dubious paste in white sandwiches; dark tea with milk (ok - this is a personal shudder not shared by all) ...

I could probably go on. So could you, if you're old enough - feel free to add more in the comments. But over all, and this is a memory reinforced by listening to Stephen Fry on the radio yesterday and to someone telling us how to bake scones as we hurtled up the M6 on Friday - over all these lie the accents of the near past, the cut-glass vowels of Received Pronunciation/BBC English. Even the Queen doesn't speak quite like that these days, though I'll bet there are still plenty of people around ready to judge you by the sounds that come out of your mouth. (Tip for today: try speaking with your molars firmly clenched together. Articulate as clearly as you can. You'll be amused by the instant resemblance to at least one member of the Windsor family).

The scones, by the way, were accompanied by a discussion on how to pronounce them. Skoanes, or skonns?  I always understood it was the truly posh who used the former, but the programme suggested otherwise. When it comes to forehead, however, I seem to be ... well, posh. Forred. And we used to talk about the drawing room, which I used to wonder about: did people draw there? (I was told - it's a withdrawing room). Again, I'd be fascinated by any contributions that you, gentle readers, might care to make to this conversation. It all seemed to matter, back then.

I wouldn't go back to the '50s. There is too much around now that I'd miss - for heaven's sake, I'd have to write letters to people. I don't even know that I'd want to be 12 again. But just today, as I imagine the men I know adorned by trilby hats and the odd fairisle pullover, I shall reminisce. And I realise I can recall, quite clearly, the Suez Crisis - though it all happened on the radio, natch. Smoke, anyone?

The conversation

Under a pale sun - not cool,just
grey and calm - the words
flowed. Dissonance and history,
patronage and eternal things,
maths and music and the links or
not links were tossed about,
resolved and questioned,
worried and smoothed against the demons
that might darken a day.
And all around the earnest talk
the birdsong fluttered in the unthinking light,
the peerless technique of the singers
rising and falling among the flowers,
its challenge merely territorial
its  beauty only in our minds.

©C.M.M 07/11

Dancing Backwards for a holiday

I always save promising books for holidays - by which I mean time spent away from home - and almost always end up hardly reading at all because of whatever activity the holiday brings and the resulting torpor at the end of the day. But Dancing Backwards, by Salley Vickers, had me proposing 'a quiet morning' so that I could get on with it. All right, the weather was fine and the garden inviting and set in a favourite glen, so I wasn't exactly turning my back on life, but all the same ...

As with Miss Garnet's Angel, I found myself liking the principal character from the first page. Her dismayed reaction to the queues to join her expensive cruise ship struck a chord, as did her determination to have the windows open to the sea while she slept. I felt safe and engaged and ready to explore the ship, the other passengers and Violet's past - and I knew I had the breadth of the Atlantic in which to do it.

The prose is deceptively simple and calmly perfect. Past and present follow one another in illuminating pairings as Violet is prompted to remember by the events of the cruise. And as she recalls her past we learn more about the woman she has become, and understand why she becomes so involved with the people she meets. Her involvement with Dino, one of the professional dancers on the ship, completes this stage in her development and she leaves the ship in New York with a new ability to cope with the next stage in her life.

So yes, it was a good book for a holiday. I don't know how it makes me feel about a cruise, though ...

While life goes on ...

We attended a midday Eucharist today in All Saints, Hereford - an ancient, city centre church that was in a bad way until a cafe was set up at the back of the nave. I have been there several times, as the friend with whom I am staying celebrates at the Wednesday lunchtime Eucharist on a regular basis, and we tend to stay to have our lunch in the busy cafe that has been clattering with life and cutlery all through the service.

In a way, it's quite easy to blot out the noise, because it's a feature of the worship during the week: there is a fully-functioning commercial operation there which helps to keep the church open and in decent nick. There is even one of these marvellous pod loos which are the envy of the looless
everywhere. It always makes me think of what it must have been like in first century Jerusalem, where the events of Holy Week were played out against the backdrop of other people's noisy indifference.

In fact, it was harder as we ate our lunch to ignore the behaviour of two children, obviously set loose by their mother to let her eat in peace, who were on the rampage in the choir of the church. When she finally deigned to collect them - before, as she herself said, they trashed the place - she seemed quite oblivious to the fact that their behaviour was totally out of place and was causing considerable irritation to several people.

So what do we do? Do we go on the assumption that we can't snarl at the kids - or their mother - lest they are confirmed in some prejudice about church and religion? Or do we stand up for a sense of place and of decorum and insist that a place of worship isn't a playground where banging the seats up and down is all good clean fun? After all - where and when did we all learn how to behave?

Just asking ...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Herefordshire

Being here

Caisteal Abhail and Ceum na Caillich
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Being here has always mattered more
than where I’m going. So.
To be aware of the elusive scent
of myrtle in the sun, to catch
the distant gleam of wet rock
in the corrie’s dark recess,
to note the brown swirl of the timeless burn
- all this erodes its own path,
creates a time-worn journey in my soul,
a path to which I turn without a thought
of where it all might end.
The upturned wings glide overhead
- a whisper passing in the breeze –
and if I never know I have arrived
so be it. I am here.

©C.M.M. 07/12

You can find this poem with the view I was seeing when the first sentence came into my head here, though in many ways it is more applicable to the place in this photo, where I have often stopped instead of climbing further. Because of the rules of Blipfoto, I couldn't use this pic for the entry.

Of crows (or not) and sinews

Another improbably lovely morning in Glen Rosa as the early clouds melt and a hot sun shines on the garden - a totally private and sheltered place by virtue of the enormous rhododendrons that surround it. Yesterday was spent, you might say, on the doorstep - if doorsteps can extend for about 5 miles and climb several hundred feet and take over seven hours to traverse! For those unfamiliar with the terrain, Glen Rosa is a perfect glaciated valley rising through its length to a well-defined saddle which separates it from Glen Sannox. That saddle is where we ate our picnic yesterday, as two large black birds - crows? ravens? - shambled over the rocks or swished overhead so close that we could hear the wind in their feathers. I think they might have been disappointed when we rose from a post-prandial snooze against a huge rock; they may have been looking forward to a mid-afternoon snack...

I was alarmed by the fact that my tendons seem to have gone like perished elastic since I last louped down this glen; the recently sprained ankle certainly made life more precarious despite the fact that it held up until the last stretch near the Garbh Allt. I found myself quoting Hamlet: And now my sinews, bear me stiffly up ...

This morning, they are merely stiff. And I have a blister on the ball of my foot. But I have already slipped into the Arran mode of not caring too much about eating out, not caring that shorts don't really do much for my looks any more, and I think today will involve another picnic and another walk. Seaside today, I think .... Blackwaterfoot? King' Caves? The wonderful butcher in the village?

Life's hard, innit?

Home, home ... In the glen

It's an odd feeling to be here - and an annoying feeling not to be able to send a photo of here to the blog: for some reason, despite an excellent signal, my phone has decided it can't cope with blogs and I don't have a lead for my camera here. Ah well. Aficionados of Glen Rosa, on Arran, can visualise for themselves the small white cottage to the right of the track, just before the campsite - the last house in the glen as you head for the Garbh Allt and the hills. And we are here, for a week.

I've been sitting outside on the wooden seat against the white-painted stone wall of this old cottage listening the the birds and the silence that enfolds their song. Last night, on a final visit to the garden in the gloaming, I found a rabbit calmly cleaning his paws, and this morning early there were two of them wetting their bottoms on the dew. (Actually I think it rained a bit in the night, but dew sounds more poetic) The Dutch Venture Scouts who were camping by the burn below us were admirably silent in the night, and by the time we surfaced this morning had folded their tents and stolen away. The summit of Goatfell, just visible from the garden gate, is clear and the morning calm.

What is so amazing for me is the sensation of living halfway to one of my favourite places, in the middle of the surroundings that sum up all I love about Arran. In a moment I shall make some coffee and take it out to that bench, and then we shall potter down to Brodick in search of a paper (no, not that paper). A spot of lunch, then off to walk another glen; we'll save the length of Glen Rosa for a day when we feel more energetic. In the meanwhile, I shall enjoy just being here.

And there's Wifi in the cottage. Joy!

Chew, don't swallow.

Another blog post, another novel. It's not that I've been devouring fiction more than usual, more a failure to blog that brings this about. I began Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin before I went to France - a mistake, as it is a fat book and not mine own, so I didn't want to stuff it into my flight bag. I had just begun to feel at home in the complexities of the tale when I left, and it took me a while to get back into it, for there are different voices narrating the components of Iris and Laura Chase's life together and I was, frankly, confused.

I think it was the effort required that initially put me off reading a book that's sat on the bookshelf for long enough to acquire a sun-tanned lower half (sorry, Morgane) - but it was self-disgust that kept me at it this time. I don't want to subsist on Mills & Boone in my declining years, after all ...

Iris Chase is remembering, as her body ages and her heart gives warnings of mortality. She is recalling the circumstances of her younger sister's death, and in doing this tells the story of their childhood together and their adult fates. As Iris is now old, the story covers much of the twentieth century - wars happen and mark the novel's protagonists, political events hinder their aspirations, society changes and with it their own lives.

The blind assassin of the title appears in the strange fiction that runs through the novel - much as the odd story of the sorcerer in Oranges are not the Only Fruit - but seems to seep out into reality as Laura Chase suffers in real life only to survive as a legend. Newspaper items surface as a contemporary commentary on Iris' memories, and Atwood's mastery of tense and person, of location and mood, pervades the whole, as it did in Alias Grace. I feel I've had an introduction to two centuries of Canada after these two books - and want to re-read the classics I read twenty years ago to check on what I found there.

Another holiday book for when you know you won't be disturbed - a book to chew rather than to swallow, and deeply satisfying.

Emma Donoghue's Room

I've always had a difficulty with books entirely written in a voice with which I'm uneasy. I never managed, for example, to read The Color Purple all the way through, because the narrator's English was so heavily Deep-South that the spelling of it gave me a headache. I managed with Sunset Song, but that is a masterpiece. And I managed with Room, by Emma Donoghue, although I nearly gave up after the first ten pages. And maybe the fact that I didn't points to the masterly handling that makes this book extraordinary.

We all read in horror, watch the news with unbelieving avidity, when a story breaks of someone held hostage, sexually abused, exploited, and then, miraculously, discovered and liberated. We unite in condemnation of the abusers, and wonder at the shadowy figures of their victims - but we don't often think about the effect on their lives of what they've been through. They're free, and we thank God, or the police, and move on.

This novel forces you to stay in captivity, physical and mental. It is told by Jack, who is five and was born in the room where he lives with his mother, Ma. He watches carefully regulated television, but the rest of his experience is of the confined space in which they live - a space where the beeps of the security lock on the door herald the nightly visits of Old Nick, the provider of Sunday Treats and the abuser of his mother - and Jack's father. The five-year-old's perception of what he experiences means that for a while after reading the book you too start seeing things differently, and even when he is able to experience Outside for the first time he has his own particular interpretation of what he finds there.

Jack is a captivating and fascinating narrator who has no judgement to pass on his prison because it is all that he knows. By the time he cuts off his long hair and finds that he still has the strength to cope with the world, we too have developed a changed perspective of our lives.

A book group would have a ball with this disturbing and engrossing novel.

End of an era

Jupiter
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Ok, that's a hackneyed header. And it's in today's local paper - but my era is different. Everyone is discussing the end of the car ferry service from Gourock to Dunoon pier; I travelled on one of the last crossings on Thursday. But the era I'm talking about is personal, for we arrived in Dunoon at the same time as the car ferries Juno and Jupiter - the ship in the pic - and my trip t'other day was on MV Saturn, which started on the Rothesay run three years later, in 1977. So as well as wondering, along with the rest of us, how the replacement passenger service will work in the winter (we know already that one of the two ships, the Ali Cat, goes off in a breeze) and how big the queues of cars for Western Ferries will be (to say nothing of Cowal Games weekend) I'm reflecting on the years since 1974 from a personal perspective.

We came here with a 5 week old baby and moved into a school-owned council house in Ardenslate. Our first morning was marked by the main fuse's blowing and our worry that as the leccy came via the Hydro-electric, based in Perth, we wouldn't get it fixed till the Monday. (Didn't know they had local fixers ...). We had no telly and no phone - and no mobiles or internet, remember. I was alone with a five-week-old baby, once Mr B had gone to work; I didn't drive and I only knew one person and it rained a lot. I got the phone by stressing the baby-panics, and the telly arrived a few days later and provided some sanity. The church provided the rest. (Strange, but true).

And of course time passed. We met people in droves, and more importantly made good friends. We started a choir - the Hesperians - and performed with them. We bought the house we still live in and I learned to drive. The baby grew up and another one appeared and followed him; they both left at the age of 17 and never lived here again. (That's what happens to clever kids here. They go. Some return, but more stay gone). I returned to teaching and for five days a week we could have been living anywhere: a school's a school's a school. The American navy loomed large for a while - especially when I was big in the local CND - and then left. The town appeared less rented, more stable. New houses appeared in fields, sometimes with scant regard for the tendency of said fields to drown in the winter. Generations of school pupils passed through our lives, and some of them surfaced on Facebook.

And now I'm back where I started, in some ways. I don't work - at least, I don't do paid work and huvtaes - and the church is still the constant in a changing life. We still sing, though the Hesperian men have gone the way of all flesh and we're now a women's group. There are occasional babies in our house in the shape of visiting grandchildren, though the original babies show little inclination to return. In my Glasgow childhood, I always hankered for a life involving sea and hills; my own children seem drawn to cities and urban pursuits.

But through all that - a life, really - the Cal Mac ferries came and went, easily visible from my window. Now they're away, and the new boat still hasn't put in an appearance. And I can't help wondering if somewhere, hidden in the ferry saga, there isn't a metaphor for life.

But I haven't worked it out yet.

Frock it!

I very rarely write about clothes. Dresses even less often. But there's a family wedding on the horizon, and it will still be summer (stop laughing) and the usual black elegant breeks seem ... well, black. And besides they've been round the block a bit, beginning with the time they climbed out of an Argyll ditch after a car crash, and that wasn't yesterday. The good news, I suppose, is that they remained elegant and that they still fit. But I digress.

In the interests of trying, I send for a dress that caught my eye in a sale. Lovely material - silk/cotton - lovely  subtle slatey colour, potentially flattering lines and length. And it arrives, and it fits. But there's the rub. I don't like myself in it. I hitch up the skirt to see if the new knee-length would have been any better, but find it as unflattering as ever. (I don't think knee-length cuts it unless you wear killer heels and have a long tibia. Or two.) I realise my ankles are looking ... well, old. The bump from the sprain a month ago doesn't help, and I daresay they'd be improved by tights - another horror. Loathe tights.

I think I'm in danger of looking like the matronly aunt-in-law that I actually am. I can't bear myself in this mode. What to do? I shall give the shops one last try. I'm not holding out much hope. But I'd like to issue a warning to any of the generation that might be having any ideas: I'm not up for this dressing-for-a-wedding caper. It's not me.

Now, what about a nice little fascinator ...?

Who's Corpus Christi?

Bit slow off the mark, I'm afraid, as a visit to Glasgow for a service in the evening involves The Last Ferry and a rather late night. But I've just been reading the authoritative report of last evening's proceedings in St Mary's Cathedral and feel moved to make my own.

I've been to only one other celebration of Corpus Christi in my day - perhaps 15 years ago now, when Dale Grey was the Warden at Cumbrae and laid on a joyous service with a visiting choir (not one I was in) and a procession round the grounds of the Cathedral there. I had some idea of what to expect in the way of ceremony and I knew there would be rose petals, but I had no notion of how I might react. This is how it feels now:

I have a renewed appreciation of the power of ritual. When ritual is beautifully done, with conviction and authority and no attempt to make it ordinary or contemporary, it is capable of sweeping the participants into its self-forgetting rhythm. This is what happened. The sacrament was there in the monstrance (left) and was paraded round the church in a procession of incense (from two thuribles!) preceded by a rain of rose petals from an ever-replenished basin (there are more photos on Kelvin's blog on the link above). And as it passed we turned, like subjects of old, so as to have our eyes always on the monstrance and what it contained. Suddenly it became real, in the sense that we talk, as Kelvin did, about the Real Presence: I knew that in that circle of gold there was a wafer of unleavened bread, but when it passed me I bowed low - not once, but three times, each time it passed. That felt right. I didn't have to think about it.

We encountered here the power of symbolism - and symbolism that was appropriate and in-your-face and glorious. Usually I worship in relatively modern English, sing everything in sight, strain to hear all that is said above the noise of Godly Play, and know everyone around me. Last night's Mass was sung by a choir, in Latin; there was silence (apart from the traffic in Great Western Road) and there was glorious, thundering organ music that came reverberating through the soles of our feet, there was the all-pervading scent of the incense and I knew about three people and the celebrant. It was strange and it was exotic; it was liberating and funny and it was joyful; it was - or seemed to be - completely assured and unselfconscious.

Guess that's the key, really: unselfconsciousness. We can't be self-conscious and embarrassed, we mustn't feel we always have to justify our joyful eccentricities, we can't be apologetic Christians all the time or we've had it. Kevin introduced what was about to happen with a small joke: someone had asked "Who's this Corpus Christi that you're celebrating?" His last words at the end of the service reminded us of this question. Who is this Corpus Christi?

And the answer? It's us. Wow.


Note: There's a whole set of photos here.

And God saw that it was good

Here we are again - back in Holy Trinity for Trinity Sunday. The service has just ended, the crucifer is returning the cross to its stand, the candles are still lit. The flower power people are on holiday/sick, so there are no flowers, but that's fine. The aged seats from the long-vanished La Scala cinema (now the Dunoon branch of Mackay's) have gone from the sedilia, having finally succumbed to the damp, and have been replaced by  hassocks, and the carpet, though cleanish, now shows clearly where furniture has preserved its original colour. Obviously there is still much to be done.

But I couldn't help noticing the huge lift it gave us all on this, our Patronal festival, to see the light streaming in above the altar once more, after the weeks shrouded in tarpaulins, and the increased resonance of the organ as it banished all memories of the little keyboard Mr B had to play while his organ (hush!) was swathed in dust sheets and polythene. And there was an added frisson, for me at least, in realising during the long OT lesson - the entire Creation story - that I could hear Mary's voice at the back of the church, where the children have their Godly Play until we can accomodate them in the tower (not as bad as it sounds), echoing in a whisper the words of the story: "And God saw that it was good".

I think God would perhaps see that today was good.

Emerging from chaos ...

This rather poor photo doesn't do justice to the satisfaction it represents - a combination of a phone-camera, a gloomy day and hands trembling with the exertion of cleaning all these pews made for a weak effort in the photography department. This could not be said of the efforts the people of Holy Trinity Dunoon have made in the past year to ensure that their building ... well, worked, really.

So here you see the chancel arch minus the peeling blue paint that has disfigured it for the past ten years, and the pristine ingoes (I just learned this word) of the sanctuary windows. The scaffolding is down, and after a month of a nave altar in front of green tarpaulin we can now see the east windows again. The tower is drying out nicely and the bells are once again safe to ring. (That's what they tell me: I'm doing it tomorrow.)

The stour left was daunting, but this morning a small band of us got rid of it. The tiles were vacuumed and washed, the eagle had his orifices poked before he was polished, and the wide open spaces left by the removal of the now redundant choir stalls have us thinking of liturgical possibilities and ... polished wood flooring. There. I've said it.

It's just that as we prepare for our Patronal festival tomorrow, everything seems possible. Though I have to add that I don't clean my own house .... Strange, isn't it?

Twittering respectably

I've been catching up on some old friends' blogs - you can thank the weather for that, chaps! - and came across this post from Neil Winton just as I was pondering again (or anew, as the hymn hath it) the business of officialdom and social media. When I left the classroom - god, it's been six years - I could still look at flickr and some blogs on the school system, though Richard Holloway's work was largely taboo because, it seemed, he'd used naughty words. So NetGear said anyway.  Now, apparently, it is hard in schools to access any of the sites I've grown accustomed to using daily. Everyone and their grannies now know what Twitter is, but heaven forfend that our young should be able to use it.

Stupid logic, of course. I've been using Twitter since, November 2006. An earlyish adopter, then.  I've been blogging for a year or so longer. And I've been evangelical about the power of social media for most of the intervening years. But now I'm no longer involved in schools and education at large; my forum tends to be in church circles. So I've stood up at Synods both General and Diocesan and begged for blogs to be used to communicate and for Bishops to use Twitter. And back then - some 4/5 years ago -  I was scoffed at, either gently or violently. But gradually we saw bloggers doing their slightly risky thing on the sidelines of Synod, and then Twitter took over as comments were tweeted and shared live. Bishops blogged and had Facebook accounts. There were lunchtime meetings to help the uninitiated get over their fears (I'm talking General Synod here - all two and a half days of it) and, finally, official guidelines in the Synod papers for kind and responsible Tweeting. Social media had, on the face of it, arrived.

But we need to be careful here. There are still many, many people who have "no time" for Twitter and "all that stuff" - and that "no time" can be factual or pejorative in intent. And all too often they are the people who run organisations - because suddenly they see the huge potential for ... what? Anarchy? Revolution? Criticism?

Yes. Of course. All of these things. That's why repressive regimes block Facebook. I'm reminded, probably because of the context in which I now operate, of how the Bible used to be forbidden fruit to the common people, and then to women - much safer to keep it in Latin and in the hands of the priests, much more seemly for women to take their men's word for what was in this dangerous book. But hey - we all read the Bible now, if we feel so inclined, and we sometimes find new and exciting things in it, in our unschooled, lay fashion. And the job of the professionals is to help all of us to read sensibly, not to make basic errors in comprehension, to put it in a historical context and so on. The church as it is today, shrinking as it may be, seems to me a healthier and more alive organism for the active participation of its members.

And what, do you ask, has this to do with Twitter? Well, Twitter and other social media exist. People have become accustomed to using them to broadcast their status. Not all people are sensible, and some users of social media are downright silly - they're just people. But you can't stop them making fools of themselves, in public or not. You can assume that people at a gathering like Synod will, for the most part, have a modicum of intelligence and a large helping of goodwill - they wouldn't be there otherwise. I've already remarked on the lack of much tweeting during the last Synod - because someone, apparently, thought fit to warn them off at one point. I missed that bit, so I don't know how it was done. But for next year, I'd like to see a Twitter live backchat channel on the screens, so that everyone in the hall can see what's being said as it's said - and the people up front can have the chance to react to it.

Going back to the trigger for this post - the drive to have social media become normal in schools - I'm pushed into wondering if official blessing is in fact the one way to kill something off. I think our young might well tell us it is ...

Lilies in the wind

The stinking lilies (left) are all out - I suspect they have a posh name, like Turk's Cap lilies or something, but their ammonia smell means that for the past 35 years I've thought of them as stinking. The Philadelphus, just behind them, is also beginning to come out, its sweet scent just making itself known over the ammonia. The sun is shining, albeit fitfully. I should be feeling mellow.

But I'm not. For a start they're too early: these are real end-of-term scents, the scents of warm summer evenings coming home late from school concerts or prizegivings, and it's not just that I am no longer involved in such matters upsetting things. The lilies were out before the end of May, presumably hastened by the almost-forgotten warmth of March and April, and now they hang over the path beaten out of shape by the rain that dominated last month. And warm it is not: after a promising start we had cloud and now there's a brisk and chilly wind. This may be global warming, or it may just be another example of the variable weather of the west. Either way, it's got me jangled.

I think I need another holiday. But we've not yet passed Trinity Sunday ...

Fiddling at Synod?

Oh dear. I've been remiss in my blogging - but I've been away. Not more continental junketings, alas, but at the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church. I seem to have participated rather often in this gathering over the years, but realise it's because I was a diocesan alternate before I was chosen as a representative ... but I maunder. Don't expect an official or exhaustive take on proceedings, however - you can find that here - my impressions are very patchy this year.

This is largely because I missed quite a chunk of things, including the task of facilitating discussion - I'd been looking forward to that - because I was no weel. Quite apart from my scheduled trip to Glasgow to have a small bit of me removed, I suffered horribly from our diocesan dinner and missed a whole morning on Mission; by the time I returned I realised I felt the way I used to after an absence from school: you caught measles or somesuch and when you went back you found out that everyone else had learned to do long division and you were totally lost.

And it's hard to get back into things in those circumstances. I was led to ponder how vital it is that individual speakers engage with their audience - it is so easy to switch off and let the mind wander as some voice drones on about ... but if I'm specific I shall pinpoint the offenders, and it is not my intention to wound. Rather I would beg that speakers are instructed in the art of eye contact, tonal variation and register - indeed, in the whole art of public speaking that they would have learned in Standard Grade had they been in my classroom. Maybe there's a job there for a certain bishop on the verge of retirement: having muttered resentfully about the boredom of one address, and having been rebuked by a more charitable neighbour on the grounds that this was after all the graveyard slot, I found myself once more engaged - and amused - by said bishop in his follow-up comments. Graveyard? I reckon he could make the dead laugh ...

Just to show that I'm not all girns and detachment, I should add here how much I enjoyed the break from traditional tedium offered by the indaba process. I was in a feisty group which in the end had to agree to disagree, but it was such a relief to be able to test responses on others rather than one's unfortunate neighbour or the twitterverse at large - though I had the feeling, confirmed later, that the twitterers had been somewhat discouraged while I was away being poorly. Someone had got it into their head that to tweet meant to be insensitive and crass and that it had therefore to be spelled out when tweeting would be inappropriate. I fear that is what happens when a spontaneous activity becomes respectable ... and I'm glad I didn't know about it, for that would have made me much, much worse.

But you'll be glad to know that my old friend the complacent male was at Synod. This was a cunningly camouflaged wee dinosaur, but his message was the same: it's a waste of time - in fact, it's navel-gazing - to fret about gender imbalance in church matters. He said it so quietly, slipping it in after one of the more mind-numbing exegeses, that we were onto the next item before I'd clocked it and got my hackles working - I told you I'd been no weel - and I was left frustrated. I shoulda said something. But then it was pointed out to me that his comment had been met by a wall of silence.  And it was suggested that I should perhaps think about this silence. What did it mean? Well for a start it sure wasn't applause - and we'd had plenty of applause for other speakers, so people were by no means apathetic. As a teacher and speaker, I know there is nothing more disheartening than silence - for I take silence to show indifference or apathy, or perhaps that everyone has gone to sleep. So maybe I wasn't needed after all - maybe the church as a body is getting past the Mesozoic age (I had to look that up) and his remark was indeed seen as crass by the majority of those present. Maybe my more normal kneejerk reaction would have merely confirmed him - and others, for I'm sure he's still not quite alone - that women (or other excluded groups) are only interested in their own causes and don't care that creation burns (see pic). The silence on the part of all the Saturday Synod survivors might even have taught him that he really shouldn't say these things. (It may be too late for him not to think them - he was not in his first youth)

But I feel I'm going on a bit. I shall finish with what, after cooling down slighly, I tweeted as my last word on the Synod:

The day a woman stands up and says we should not fuss about gender balance, all will be well. #pisky #secsynod

On the march again

On the march again
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Having caught up on most of my life, thanks to a dreich day with no huvtaes, I find I have time to reflect on my holiday with HF last week. We were walking in the Dordogne, in the neighbourhood of Sarlat, with what turned out to be a wonderfully interesting group of people from New York State, England and New Zealand. I've blogged about HF before, but I came home once more convinced of the merits of this kind of holiday - to say nothing about my enthusiasm for this part of France, new to me despite my frequent visits to more northern areas.

The photo shows pale grey skies on the first full day, replaced for most of the week by flawless blue, but the line of walkers shows for the sceptical how not every moment of a walk is filled with conversation - and reflects the fact that I had sprained my ankle, infuriatingly, within 10 minutes of starting off. (I subsequently completed the 10 mile hike, and resumed the programme after a day by the pool, but I'm not telling the quack)

So what do I remember? Birdsong, poppies, warmth, mellow golden stone, undulating landscape, the river deep in its gorge, the amazing troglodyte dwellings at Roque St Christophe ... singing "Veni Creator" in a stolen moment in a wonderful church in a tiny village when everyone else had moved off and hearing it soar in the awesome acoustic ... fascinating conversations with interesting people ... talking about all the so-called forbidden subjects as Mina took my mind off my ankle by discussing politics and religion ... food so good that we all looked forward to the leisurely dinners cooked by the chefs who came nightly to our hotel to cook for us.

Ok, so this is becoming a list, and therefore boring. Enough to say that the week was far from boring, and that my French felt much more useful than in the past. I enjoyed conversations in French on my day off, and I shared the poolside with a lizard in the hot sun. I'd love to be there now, and start to look forward to my next trip.

Itchy feet? Moi?