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Beheading is good!

Breasts are bad!

Yet another reason why I'm not on Facebook.  

Real Fire

One of our criteria for a manse is it must have a real fire.

Missing Children

In the UK a child is reported missing every three minutes.  That's around 140,000 every year, and most of these are not mentioned in the press.  The UK Missing Kids website maintains a list of missing children, many of whom have been missing for decades.  There are nine children listed that went missing in 2007, and are still missing.  Can you name two of them?

Some of the UK's missing have run away, some have been taken abroad by parents, some are involved in human trafficking, some end up on the streets, and some end up dead.  Looking out for the missing  and helping those on the streets is something we need to be doing, because it's rare that any of them get publicity.  You only ever hear about the white ones.


 While some of the missing in the USA version of this video were found, at least one was murdered by  the child's mother.  The UK version of this video featured two of Peter Tobin's victims.

Don't have nightmares.

Placement Begiins

So I started my placement the other week at Lowry (North) church.  It wasn't my first choice of placement, but it was getting difficult finding places where I hadn't already lead worship, been on placement, or been at Mrs Gerbil's placement.  I had planned on avoiding Lowry (North) as the minister was my presbytery rep for my meetings with 121, however 121 had other ideas.

So, I met with Stephen, the minister, and he gave me the guided tour.  There's plenty to keep me busy, with the usual fayre of Board, Session and Guild.  A pretty good selection of youth groups, three schools, a couple of care homes, and a group of Methodists that are having their church renovated and will be using Lowry (North) for worship.  There's also a regular cafe that does a pretty reasonable bowl of soup, and once they learn that vegetables are the devil's excrement, and that side salad never belongs on a plate, then their plain cheese sandwiches will be prefect.

So I can see things I want to learn, things that will challenge me, and things I want to change. I am trying to get all the daytime things visited early on.  I am getting a bit bored with retirement, so I am looking for a bit of work.  Three job interviews are coming over the next 7 days.  We'll see what happens with them.

Dead Saints

A little bit freaky...

The short version.  Take a dead dude.  Excavate. Decorate.  Venerate.

The one that is second from the bottom, I was expecting it to come to life and say "Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls..."

Normal blogging about placement etc begins again soon...

RIP Psion

This is the remains of my Psion Series 5.  For its day it was a very powerful pocket computer, and it would still give modern computers a run for their money. 

The keyboard wasn't much smaller than the netbook keyboard I'm using today, yet the clamshell design meant it folded down into a very neat package. You could easily touch type, which was a very useful thing, as it came complete with a full office package that was compatible with Microsoft Office, yet it ran on a tiny memory.  It could multi-task, and it even had a mobile browser.  Touch screen technology and a with a bit of persuasion it could even do handwriting recognition.  You think ebooks are new?  I was reading them in 1998 on this.  The majority of my HND was written through this machine.  Internet wasn't a problem, as it would connect to a dial up modem, or even wireless through my mobile phone.

This was a highly efficient design  Two AA batteries would last me a couple of days, even if I was using rechargeable batteries.  They made every byte of memory count.

But it does have its downside.  For Psion, the predecessor to the Series 5, the Series 3 family were very well built machines with a loyal following.  People were reluctant to switch over to a new device when the one they were using was still serving them well.  And for me, the end of my Psion was when the screen cable died.  The clever folding design had a weak point in that the ribbon cable between screen and motherboard would give way.  Out of warranty, this was an expensive repair, so after nearly four years of daily use, I had to retire my Psion. 

I managed to track down a replacement screen cable the other day, and I was going to attempt a fix, but I'm afraid this Psion is too far gone.  Deeper investigation revealed a couple of problems that I must have caused myself somewhere along the way.

It's just a shame that Psion is no longer in the palmtop computer market any more.  I am yet to find a machine that is as functional as the Psion. 

Rest in pieces Psion Series 5, you served me well.

Flamed.

I was at a church meeting the other day, and as is the norm (or should be) in church gatherings, there was a lot of praying.  As the speaker proceeded, from a couple of rows behind me, someone threw in the occasional loud "Amen" whenever he found a particular point spiritually agreeable.  I know the guy.  He was at one of the fifty churches I've visited this year and he's a pleasant chap.  Very confident in his faith. We'll call him Trevor

As is also the norm in the church, once you have been to one meeting, you are sooner or later going to find yourself at another meeting.  And normally there are one or two faces from the first meeting at the second.  So at the second meeting, two men from the first meeting came over and we had the "don't I know you from somewhere" conversation.  When the topic of the first meeting came up, one of the men mentioned Trevor and his "Amen's" That was when the second man said to the first that Trevor belonged in the Baptists, not the CofS, to which the first man agreed.  Well I wasn't standing for this.  I flamed them.  I told them in no uncertain terms that we needed more people in the CofS that are so spiritually confident and who are so certain in their faith.  We needed more people who were so outgoing about their Christianity, and that there was nothing worse than a group of dour sounding church members expressing their joy in Christ's saving grace.  We need to be more alive.

And the two men.  One is a Minister, the other I think is a Session Clerk. 

If you find yourself wishing someone would leave the church, I think it's you that has the problem, so you might not want to let the door hit you on the way out.  We should be prayerfully including all comers, and giving welcome to all who wish to join in.

Amen to that.

Year 2 Conference

I don't do mornings.  Speaking to me before the second mug of tea is a bad idea.  I don't do conversation before 9am, so conference breakfast can be awkward.  There should be a separate area reserved for grumpy old bastards like myself where we can sit, ignore each other and eat our Weetabix in silence.  So despite getting to the canteen as it opened, and sitting at the far side of the hall from everyone else, and with my back to them, someone will always come over and tell me that I can't have breakfast on my own.  A statement that they then prove by sitting down with me.  I'm happy to talk at lunch, dinner, over coffee, or even in the pub, but please, can I just start the day my way?


This conference was the last time I will be at conference with the third years.  I've known these people since Mrs Gerbil started training, so it will be odd next year not having them around.  But we did get to meet the new trainees, and unlike last year, they were around for the whole weekend, having had their own conference a fortnight or so before.  Next year, I am in the third year.  How did that happen?

There are now four more trainee ministers that have been on the back of the bike.  That's six in a year!  Should my next project be Fifty Pillion Reverends?

The theme of conference for my year group was on worship.  For many of us, we have been leading parts of worship throughout our enquiry process and placements for a number of years, not to mention any worship we have delivered in or former lives.  It could seem a little late in the day to be receiving this training, but I believe that the training in pastoral care I was given in last years conference should be the subject of the first year.  I have had more pastoral encounters over the past 12 months than I have delivered worship, so the order of conference training seems fine.  The content of the worship training was ideal.  We have all had different experience of worship, and it was good to bounce ideas around and really consider why we do things in worship, and in what order they occur. 

When discussing the creation of a worship space, in amongst my notes, scribbled in a hand that never actually writes anything down in pen and ink was a line that said "(interaction of time space and thought? Creates thin spaces?)"  I shared this with a colleague over a pint and they asked if I had came up with that myself.  I had to confess it was partly a Star Trek plot, and partly a sermon that Beachblesser delivered last year.  I'm not sure if I have an original thought in my head, just lots of recycled ideas.  And they are more Sci-fi than theological.  Live long and prosper.

Former moderator Albert Bogle delivered our opening session.  He's a man of great ideas, and had plenty to say about using technology for mission.  While in many ways I agree that the church should not lag too far behind in using modern technology to deliver its message, we may differ in the way we see change being accepted in our congregations.  I have been surprised this year to discover that many younger people prefer more traditional styles of worship, preferring the stability that can be taken from a more structured liturgy. 

In other news, the regular worship was pleasant.  While a band did form by the end of the second day, the first acts of worship saw us singing unaccompanied.  We are a surprisingly tuneful bunch, and the collective human voice is actually a great sound.  Despite having some exceptionally skilled musicians amongst us, including an outstanding harpist with her portable harp (specially commissioned to be lightweight) I think I preferred the unaccompanied singing.

It was one of the final sessions that I got the most out of.  Due to a small communication error, I wasn't even supposed to be around at the preaching workshop which took place after the OLM's were supposed to leave.  But I had a spare sermon in my folder, so I was given the chance to receive feedback on one of my sermons.  It was the one at the end of my post from 18th November 2012 on silence.  I had others on my tablet, but this was the one that seemed to suit a small, reflective audience.  But it was one of my fellow candidates that delivered the most memorable lesson of the weekend.  She was actually at my first enquirers conference back in 2008, but the process of her getting to this stage has taken a long time.  I'm not going to give away more about her, as ministry is a small world.  What I can say is that she read out a letter she had written.  The reading of this letter really took me back to the early churches, where correspondence was the way the churches grew.  On the table before her, there was a few items from her parish, including a small scrap of wood with a bent nail in it.  There are a couple of bent nails in my shed, and a lot of them in my parents garage.  Bent nails are useful things.  They might not be useful for joining things together any more, but they are great for hanging things up.  Or the bent nail that kept the gearbox in my Dad's Mini working.

Lesson for the weekend.  God has a use for bent nails like us.

Water Into wine

 

It's been a great season this year for hedge fruit.  Raspberries, wild strawberries and brambles have all done amazingly well, and we are right into the bramble season just now.  By bramble, I mean the wild blackberry that is found on waste ground, although international readers may refer to many hedge fruits as brambles. You may wish to have a look at the wiki entry on brambles as it all gets confusing.  I didn't know there were so many varieties.

Home winemaking has started to take off again, pioneered my small health food shops, such as my main supplier, Stirling Health Foods.  Even the larger stores such as Tesco and Lakeland are getting in on the act, but you can't beat speaking to an expert, when it comes to getting started.  Boots used to have a large part of their stores reserved for home brewing, but that went a long time ago.  If you want to get into the hobby, you can get a starter kit for £35 which will make around 6 bottles.  After that, most of the kit is reusable, so you could experiment with the free fruit that is bursting forth just now.

The best places to find brambles are railway embankments (disused preferably) or Victorian graveyards.  If you happen to have a west facing railway embankment that borders a Victorian graveyard then you can pick a couple of kilos of fruit in about 30 minutes.  Or so I am told....

Why not have a look at my recipe for bramble wine...

If You Do That Again I'll Cut Off Your Fingers!

Microphone users, I'm watching you...

This is the inside of a failed radio microphone plug.  There are actually two broken wires here, one in the plug itself, and another near the right crocodile clip that was causing an intermittent crackling sound.  An hour of careful soldering, heat-shrinking and testing later and the microphone is back in working order.

Over the past year I have seen a complete lack of respect for microphones.  I've seen them swung around by their cables, antennae used as a handle to haul them out of pockets, and when they are finished, the wire is tightly wrapped around the transmitter.  The wires used in microphones are exceptionally thin, thinner than the cheap earbud headphones that come with MP3 players.  They have to be thin, so they are unobtrusive, but this makes them fragile. It would be possible to replace the wire with the orange cable from a flymo, but that might be excessive...

So now having repaired a couple of microphones, I am warning microphone users everywhere that I will forgive you for swinging the microphone around by either of its cables, but only after I have cut off one your fingers.  I know I'm supposed to forgive you 77 times, but I'm sure you will get the hint after the tenth digit.