Fa-La-La-La-La (What do you mean I'm a bit late for that?!)

Happy New Year, everyone... Welcome to my 2008...

Over the festive season, I’ve had a few chances to reacquaint myself with a few things I had forgotten.

Firstly, how lovely it is to experience Christmas with Nikki and Luke – truly the most amazing two people I have ever met, and wonderfully, the two people can share my life with. I had some lovely gifts, and couldn’t care less how much or little anyone spent, or how many gifts I received – the best bits for me is always seeing other people get presents.

Secondly, I FINALLY saw The History Boys by Alan Bennett thanks to BBC 2… And my love of Alan Bennett’s writing was completely re-awakened. I’ve re-read the script to The History Boys twice since seeing the film, and savoured so much that its made me want to turn back and try acting again… as well as begin to write again. Amazing what 90 minutes of sort-of sitting still can do to you. There were moments that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, just like the first time I saw A Chip In The Sugar from the original Talking Heads series way back when I was 14 or 15, or when I first put on a tape of Beyond The Fringe. I’m so glad he’s still writing and making an impact – the world will be a far, far poorer place when he stops writing. No one has the same acute sense of detail, gentle or sensitive touch with tragedy or the same unassuming humour as him. I’ve always felt an affinity, a closeness to his words that I cannot and don’t really want to explain.

The reason I’ve always loved his writing – and why I love reading in general - is gloriously summed up by this line, spoken by Hector in The History Boys:


"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

Thirdly, the songwriting of Steve Earle. I love some country music – essentially people who try and do something interesting or different within the genre (the same could be true for any of my tastes in music). But his, I admit, isn’t particularly ground-breaking or new. It is, however, distinctive. There’s not many people who can write songs that assess the state of the nation as accurately and pointedly as he did in Amerika v.6.0 – which incidentally is on the same album, Jerusalem, which gained him as much notoriety as acclaim in the US and led to his behaviour being monitored by the security services over there because of the song John Walker’s Blues which tells the story of a young American who joins the jihad against the West - I’ll put the lyrics below, but the song rocks as well as makes your brain tick, so I highly recommend checking it out for yourself. The whole album is wonderful (if you can take alt.country).

Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)
(Steve Earle)

Look at ya
Yeah, take a look in the mirror
now tell me what you see
Another satisfied customer in the front of the line for the American dream
I remember when we was both out on the boulevard
Talkin' revolution and singin' the blues
Nowadays it's letters to the editor and cheatin' on our taxes
Is the best that we can do
Come on

Look around
There's doctors down on Wall Street
Sharpenin' their scalpels and tryin' to cut a deal
Meanwhile, back at the hospital
We got accountants playin' God and countin' out the pills
Yeah, I know, that sucks – that your HMO
Ain't doin' what you thought it would do
But everybody's gotta die sometime and we can't save everybody
It's the best that we can do

Four score and a hundred and fifty years ago
Our forefathers made us equal as long as we can pay
Yeah, well maybe that wasn't exactly what they was thinkin'
Version six-point-oh of the American way
But hey we can just build a great wall around the country club
To keep the riff-raff out until the slump is through
Yeah, I realize that ain't exactly democratic, but it's either them or us
And it's the best we can do

Yeah, passionely conservative
It's the best we can do

Conservatively passionate
It's the best we can do

Meanwhile, still thinkin'
Hey, let's wage a war on drugs
It's the best we can do
Well, I don't know about you, but I kinda dig this global warming thing...

How I learned to shut up and just accept that I am who I am.

I feel like I’ve been away for a while. (from looking at the last time I wrote on here... I have - sorry!)

Since Luke was born, I’ve been on a strange and winding path. At times I have acted and reacted in ways that I never thought would be part of my make-up and that I am thoroughly ashamed of. I hate the fact that I started running away from addressing problems that needed to be sorted, and that some of the obstacles we face now are completely my fault for being a spineless idiot a year ago and not waking up quickly enough.

But, I feel like I’ve turned a corner. I’m not going to forget the shame I feel, because that’s an important lesson that I need to remember, but I’m trying to move on, I’m trying to make things right.

And that started because I began reading again.

Not just any reading, either. Sure, I read all the time, and I read a wide array of books – my favourite writers are people like Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Roger McGough, Adrian Plass, Alan Bennett, Terry Pratchett (there are SO many more that I’ll stop. If you want to know, email me)…

It was an old Adrian Plass book that turned my thoughts to sorting things out. I found my copy of the original “Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass aged 37 and ¾” while clearing some things out from mum and dad’s house. It is a book that brings back warm memories (not least because I was given it one Christmas and I devoured it over the next couple of nights – wrapping myself up in a duvet to protect myself from the cold), and it’s now something of a comfort.

Adrian’s character is a bumbling idiot, essentially. I loved his son, Gerald, in these books – he’s a great outlet for the caustic and cheeky humour that runs through the diaries, and more importantly, the character that I wanted to resemble when people met me. I think I knew what I am about to say when I originally read it, but convinced myself of being an heir to Gerald’s throne to ignore this:

I am Adrian. Completely, utterly, without exception, I am the bumbling but well-meaning fool that loves his family and loves his church, and loves his life, and tries hard while leaving catastrophe in his wake.

But my behaviour was not like that. I wasn’t being well-meaning but showing my family just how much I love them with every turn. I was finding it very hard to shake off old habits and in many ways, behave like an adult. So I began to do something about it.

The main thing I had been missing, I think, was faith. My winding path had been winding ever-further away from church. I don’t necessarily mind that. I had always been told that you cannot be a proper Christian without having any contact with a church. At university, I felt like I was bucking that trend. I was trundling along a churchless, but not Godless, path.

My faith is very important to me. It shaped and still shapes the person I am, and even at university, when I did let myself get out there and just have fun, I still limited myself, I still stopped short of the things that I am either opposed to or frightened of (or both). I didn’t go to church during those three years, except when I was at home – although my connection to God had sort of evolved from that.

Suddenly, it wasn’t about going to a thronging building, singing hymns just as quietly as the person next to you so you weren’t noticed if you sang the first line of the wrong tune. It wasn’t about healing services and parade Sundays.

Suddenly, it was just about me and God. There was no one else – no back row to slouch in, no loud organ to drown out my singing. It was just me and Him.

It was strange to begin with. I’d never really got that far into spiritual thought before. I was a pretty naïve young man, I think. I believed I was a Christian far before I realised what it meant to be one and that now you came to mention it, yes, I think I do want to follow…

There’s a lot of things I don’t like about church. I can’t stand prayers (particularly intercessionary prayers – a favourite of the URC - I fall asleep in them), healing prayers and services make me incredibly nervous and suspicious, and I don’t get along with the octave that every hymn seems to start in. That’s just three. A fourth would be that I dislike the tendency to cling on to a building as the church, instead of the people. A fifth would be that I really dislike the herd mentality that any large group tends to develop.

I have always disliked stopping worship for an offertory. It’s so public and it puts money (or “gifts”) at the centre of the worship time.

I get annoyed with the amount of unnecessary things that “need” to be in each service.
I remember that when we did an youth group evening service in advent one year (in a church where prayers of intercession were an average of about 10mins long), my prayer of intercession was three lines long. And I didn’t get any complaints – far from it, I got people thanking me.

Healing prayers provoke an unfortunate feeling of deep scepticism, and a lot of others irritate me for the tendency to dwell on our shortcomings as people. Yes, we sin, we make mistakes – but to me confession is personal. Let’s try and be thankful.

That’s one of the things I like about going to church - a lot of my prayers can be about more private things, wrong actions or thoughts, not doing something I know that I should have done. That sort of thing. But church has always been somewhere I can go to praise.

And then I found a second-hand copy of Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I’d heard of Donald Miller. I’d heard that this book has had a deep effect on a lot of people. My curiosity got the better of me, while that charity shop got £1.50 out of me.

For a long time, I never got past the introductory passage. I kept flicking the book open, reading it, and then getting rather lost in thought. I’m slowly dipping in and working through, because, yes, this is powerful stuff to me, but it’s throwing up so many images and thought strands that I feel I need to follow, to investigate. So I’m going to share this one passage with everyone who’s not read the book. This passage has triggered more in me than anything over the course of the last two years (with the exception of Nikki and Luke), and I don’t think I’ve been quite as affected by something since I first read through Much Ado About Nothing or read The Thirty Nine Steps when I was little.

“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve.

But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it
yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve.

But that was before any of this happened.”

(Donald Miller – Blue Like Jazz)

I’m still new at being a dad. OK, so it has been two years, but I am only just showing what I am good at. A lot of that comes from working full time. But taking Miller’s passage, even on the most basic levels, strikes more chords than a busy piano tuner. For whatever reason, I needed someone to show me the way.

I think I will be a new dad for a while yet. I’ll probably just about have it mastered just in time to celebrate Luke turning 18.

I don’t think I will ever stop being a learner Christian. I am not perfect – far from it. But I do know my limits, I have remembered and fixed on to my priorities, and I do kind of know where I am headed.

But I will always need that helping hand. So I’m happy to stay a beginner, thank you.