Rob's Blog

‘Til divorce us do part: God & marriage

2012-02-12T14:15:00.000Z

Originally published February 2008

A few months ago I was watching telly and the results of a psychology experiment were being reported. In the experiment they'd set up a ring-toss game with 3 pegs one behind the other quite a distance apart and allotted different scores for each of the areas, the area around the closest one scoring 10 points and the small area around the one furthest away worth 100. The psychologists discovered that the people who aimed for the furthest ring were largely by profession entrepreneurs. They were the people who were willing to go for a big score despite the bigger risk of missing whilst other people played it safe by aiming for the closer targets.

Helen and I have been married for 71/2 years. We got married at the end of the summer that Helen finished university, which was 8 months after I finished my college course. We lived together for the 3 months between Helen finishing uni in Nottingham and our wedding and also the summer before that; so we didn't really co-habit as such, but we probably would have done if it hadn't been for that pesky university Helen insisted on attending. Planning a wedding is often quoted as being one of the most stressful things you can go through, and there was certainly a lot of different elements to juggle in trying to make the day something you want whilst satisfying various different family groups, trying to make sure you don't offend someone by leaving something or someone out can take major acts of diplomacy. We had our difficulties, but managed to negotiate them successfully enough to still want to get married. And so the day came. I won't bore you with the details of what we did & who came, I'll just say that all the hard work paid off. I won't say that it was the happiest day of my life because that's a horrible cliché, but we both still rank it high in the top 2.

I was thinking things over whilst preparing for writing this blog, and I was thinking, "Why get married? Why not just live together?" and then I remembered the big pile of presents that was waiting for us when we got back from honeymoon! Neither of us was well off when we got married and – as every couple has to – we struggled to afford to set up a home as we wanted it to be. We were renting a cold damp house in a very rough area of Salford as it was all we could afford and gifts we were given went a long way towards kitting us out as we wanted rather than simply with what we could afford. But it was more than that. The gifts we were given were given to us along with people's love and support. On the day itself I was overwhelmed by people's good wishes. At the end of the day my hand and my face were aching with smiling and shaking hands with people wishing us all the best for the future, and here was the material proof that they meant it. Knowing that all these people were looking out for Helen & me and that they care what happens to us was fantastic, worth much more than the value of all that they'd bought us, and something that those people who choose to co-habit surely miss out on.

But that's not enough reason, so why get married? Well why not? If you're in a relationship that you both consider to be permanent rather than just long term, why shouldn't you declare publicly that that's what you intend? If you're going to stick together until one of you dies, why not make it official? It's difficult to think that far ahead – I remember when I was considering marrying Helen and I tried to imagine us in our 80s sitting round the fire in rocking chairs, Helen knitting and me whittling sticks but I couldn't do it. It's too far off in the future. When we made our vows we were saying that this is what we aim for (I still have 45 years to learn to whittle). It's a promise to each other, our families & friends and – if we get married in Church – to God that we will do everything we can to make the relationship work. It is a risky thing to do; things do happen and people do change. Marriages do fail, sometimes for trivial reasons, but very often for very valid and difficult reasons, but if you don't risk you don't win. There is a trend in the world of celebrity to sign pre-nuptial agreements. This can be seen as a sensible arrangement when big money is involved, but I can't help thinking it taints the wedding with the idea that it may not work out. If that get-out clause were removed maybe their marriages would be more successful.

Anyway, back to the ring toss experiment I began with and then abandoned. I was trying to think of a way of illustrating the answer to the question 'why get married?' and I think that experiment does it well. The two ways to play the game are to play it safe by aiming at the closest peg and scoring quite low, or aiming at the furthest ring and trying to score higher: it's a riskier strategy but if it works out it pays a bigger reward. And I think that's marriage. It is a bigger risk and it is hard work but if you succeed you win big time.

And here's the million dollar question: if I had my time again, would I get married?
Answer: Yes absolutely I would, just not to Helen.

Working 9 to 5: God & Careers

2012-01-08T14:07:00.000Z

Originally published in Jan 2008

One of the signs to look out for that you're getting older is that when you go to parties you start having really dull conversations. Many times I've realised too late that I've been having a conversation about car insurance or mortgages ("Fixed rate or tracker…Hmm it's a tricky one…) with total strangers. I kick myself when it happens, and promise myself to try harder to avoid it next time. But I have an ace up my sleeve: when the conversation turns to, "What do you do for a living?" You get the 'I'm in insurance' or 'I'm a teacher' and sometimes 'I'm a doctor,' and these can degenerate into another dull conversation about Government policies or haemorrhoids. But I get to say, "I'm a sound engineer," and that apparently is a very enviable job. I like it because people don't know how to have boring conversations about it, although most people would find 2 sound engineers talking about work as dull as listening to 2 accountants but that's because we get to use a secret language involving decibels, modulation techniques and psychoacoustic principles which most people don't even know exist. I know I was born to be a sound engineer and I thoroughly enjoy my profession, but it was a long time after leaving school that I found my job – indeed it was a long time before I even discovered what I wanted to do.

I've written in previous blogs about how I didn't get on too well at school, so I won't go over that again, but when I left school after A-levels I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I didn't want to spend 3 years at university studying something I wasn't interested in and would never use, so I didn't go to university, I got a job and because I hadn't a clue what I wanted to do I took the first job that was offered to me which was in the kitchens of an old folks home. I worked there for 5 years during which time I did my Local Preachers training, played in a few bands, made my first tentative steps in recording friends bands on a 4 track analogue machine and tried to find some direction for my life.

As a Christian, one of the places I looked to try to find direction was my Faith. I believe it's vitally important to find out who God made us and how that fits into the wider world and from there we'll find big clues as to what our career may be. And so I examined my belief and knowledge of God to look for clues.
Now I'm not one of those Christians that looks for flashes and bangs and God revealing himself in supernatural ways, but there are 2 incidents which have lead me to my chosen career that I begrudgingly have to admit are probably too 'co-incidental' to be co-incidences. The first one is the smaller of the 2, but without it the second one couldn't have happened.

It was 1995, I'd been at the nursing home for 5 years and needed to do something else, but didn't know what. I'd figured I could do something full time for the Church and by a process of elimination I had settled on applying to be on one of Rob Frost's seed teams for a year. This would involve being placed in a small team for a year in a Church anywhere in the country and working part time with a local church on a project. I half filled in the application form one night and was going to do the rest when a letter plopped onto my doormat from a friend of mine. He said he was finishing university that June and was looking to set up a band in Leeds as a serious attempt to be professional musicians – pop stars if you will. I didn't really think it was a serious option, but considered it only because I wasn't entirely sold on the seed team. Guess where I ended up moving to. The timing of that letter was very important in my making the decision to try do music for a living, and for the next 3 years I lived in a house with the other band members and we all took bottom rung jobs with no responsibility to maximise the time we could spend on our music.

So to co-incidence number 2. Forward fast to 1998 and the band hadn't been the success we'd hoped for. The band split at Easter and we all had to then find proper jobs. I looked at the possibility of getting into sound engineering, as this had been a growing interest whilst the band had been operational and we'd made friends with a few engineers. I discovered that it's an incredibly difficult profession to get into. There are basically 3 ways into sound engineering; the first is to do lots of volunteering at a local studio when you're a teenager and gradually work up – if you're any good. The second is to do a course and then apply for jobs – a big risk as the best courses are at private colleges and cost thousands of pounds and there are very few jobs around and they rarely get advertised, and the third way is to buy or build your own studio – a massive financial outlay and again a huge risk. The second route was the only one open to me, so when I found a prize draw in a lads mag to win a course at Manchester's school of sound recording I entered it. I didn't win.
A month or 2 later again I'm filling in the application form to attend the college and wondering how I can raise the three and a half thousand pounds that the course cost to do when 'plop,' a letter on the doormat. This one was from the school of sound recording telling me that due to a mix up in the runners up prizes they could offer me a place on the course I was applying for, for a considerably discounted rate. I snapped up the offer and moved to Manchester to study sound engineering. Again the co-incidental timing of the arrival of the letter was a big factor in my doing the course, as I would have struggled to afford the full rate of the course I took. It proves to me that I am where God wants me to be. And without doing that course I wouldn't have got the job I now have.

Whilst writing this I've remembered another incident. The lowest point in my career was in 1998 just before I started my college course when I'd been working for minimum wage for 8 years, and it was at this point that I ran into a school friend I hadn't seen since sixth form. We talked and discussed jobs. He was working in finance and earning good money while I was struggling to get by on a tiny wage. He was really shocked about how badly I was doing and said to me that he couldn't believe it as I'd always been the most together person out of all of us at school. After I'd got over the shock that I'd been considered with such regard, I thought about what he'd said. He was earning good money, but hated his job. I was earning nothing and hated my job, but was about to go to college to train to do something I loved. He was envious of me for being able to go to college and totally change what I was because if he were to do that he's lose a lot of money. I had no money to lose, so it was easy for me to risk the change. And it was a risk that paid off, if only because it makes parties more interesting.

Flushed away: God and H2O

2011-11-13T14:05:00.001Z

Originally published in November 2007

OK, pay attention to this one you might need to concentrate cos I'm going to have to explain some science and you need to keep up.

When I was in sixth form I did a Chemistry A level; which wasn't a total waste of time cos I can now read the ingredients list on the back of shampoo bottles.

Teaching my class chemistry must have been like swimming through custard as - apart from 3 oxbridge candidates - no-one was really that interested and only really took the subject to fill gaps in our timetables. Our teacher - Dr Jackson - battled on in the face of adversity and managed to hold it together until the year after we left school when he had a nervous breakdown and retired. There was the incident when one of our class had worn his trainers without socks all summer, then wore them for school. His feet smelt so dreadful that Dr Jackson had an asthma attack and we all tried to get sent out to get away from the stench. When we came to sit our mock exams we all failed (apart from the oxbridge set) and had letters sent home by Dr Jackson saying that unless we passed the re-sit he would kick us off the course. I was the only person who passed the re-sit and no-one got kicked off.

The syllabus was split into 3 sections - organic chemistry, non-organic chemistry and physical chemistry and it's this last section my story is concerned with. Unsurprisingly I can't really remember what physical chemistry is but it's something to do with the structure of molecules.

Ok, this is the sciency bit that you need to listen to. In a physical chemistry lesson and Dr Jackson's explaining the transition of states to us. In other words freezing. When a liquid freezes its molecules lose energy and gradually vibrate less and less. This means that they can sit closer together resulting in the volume of the substance shrinking which in turn means that it's density increases. The colder denser liquid sinks to the bottom of whatever's containing it and the liquid freezes from the bottom up.

Are you still with me? Good that's the simple bit.

There is one liquid, explained Dr Jackson, that doesn't behave like that and it's water. What happens with water is that it behaves perfectly normally as you cool it down to 4°C and then the molecules start to form hydrogen bonds between them. Hydrogen bonds (if my memory serves me correctly) aren't proper chemical bonds, but a loose magnetic attraction that holds molecules together. When water gets to below 4°C the hydrogen bonds start to form and they make a bit more space between the molecules resulting in the volume increasing, the colder liquid rising to the surface and water freezing from the top.

But this quirk in the properties of water is hugely significant, Dr Jackson went on to explain. Imagine if you will a lake in the middle of winter. As the air temperature drops it cools the water until the water starts to freeze. If water behaved like every other liquid the ice would form from the bottom of the lake and the layer would get thicker and thicker until the whole lake was completely frozen. Instead the ice forms at the top of the lake producing an insulating layer which prevents the water below it from freezing. This is vitally important for aquatic life as if water conformed to normal behavior and the entire lake froze everything in it, fish, insects, would freeze to death. Very little (apart from viruses and bacteria) would be able to survive and considering that science tells us that life began in the water if water behaved as every other liquid then the evolutionary chain would have been stopped before it had chance to get going. Life on this planet just wouldn't happen.

So just as we're sitting there actually listening to Dr Jackson for once and trying to take in what he'd just explained to us he carried on. "I'm an atheist," he told us. "But if any one thing was going to convince me of the existence of God it would be that; that this simple quirk, this inexplicable quirk in the properties of water is absolutely essential for the presence of life on this – or any – planet."

Then someone farted and broke the mood.

Grimly Reaping: God & Mortality

2011-10-09T14:02:00.000+01:00

Originally published October 2007

I'm not really into architecture or anything like that, but the structure that has impressed me most is the Glasgow Necropolis. I say structure; in truth it's many structures as the necropolis is a huge Victorian graveyard covering about 37 acres right in the middle of Glasgow. In it there are many mausoleums and monuments denoting the final resting places of Glasgow's dearly departed some designed by leading architects of the day. About 50,000 people are buried there.

The Victorians were fascinated by death. It was the hot topic of the time. It the years between then and now sex & death have swapped places. Death used to be discussed openly and in polite society, whilst sex was a very taboo subject. Whilst we now find it difficult turning on the TV or reading a magazine without encountering sexual content, death has become ignored and anyone who chances to mention it runs the risk of being accused of being morbid or depressing everyone.
But I'm not sure we should refuse so obstinately to talk about death. It is the only thing in life that is definitely going to happen to each and every one of us. Regardless of what we achieve in life, wherever we succeed or fail we will all die. So why do we stick our fingers in our ears and go, "La la la la la." When the subject's raised.

I actually quite like graveyards. I find them very quiet and relaxing. In the summer I sometimes go to a graveyard near where I work during my lunchbreaks to read. But I do sometimes explore old graveyards reading what's written on the gravestones and it makes me wonder about the lives of the people buried there; who were they? What became of the beloved wife they left behind? I try to find the graves of people killed in the world wars and wonder about what that person could have achieved had they not been called to fight, what the daughter left behind by lance-corporal-gunner Smith was told about the father she never met.
Does this speculation make me morbid? No, I don't think it does. In the spring & summer days when the sun is out, the birds are singing and the trees & flowers are in full bloom there is a juxtaposition between the graves and the abundance of life there is to be found in a graveyard which demonstrates the fragility and beauty of life and underlines the fact that I am alive and that I share the earth with those who went before me. "As for Man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower in the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more."

It may seem like a strange thing to say, but I think death can bring out the best in people. To be more precise, losing someone close can. I think that sometimes our grief and loss can strip away any pretensions we may hold about ourselves and in our pain there is reflected our true selves; delicate, maybe somewhat diminished, but an honest image of who we are. Families will often pull together to help each other through a difficult time where maybe they don't often communicate with each other, differences can be put aside as each person reflects and takes stock of their own life, held in relief against the passing of the one they've lost.

I've been to some great funerals. I've been to some awful ones too where peoples grief has erupted been very angry, but I've been party to some real celebrations. Because people are already emotional that emotion can be turned into something approaching a really happy time. People can reminisce and tell anecdotes and laugh and sing at funerals. Sometimes the grief can be forgotten for a few hours. It doesn't necessarily dishonour the memory of the deceased, I think most people would say they want people at their funeral to celebrate their life rather than mourn their death. I'd say that 2 out of the 10 best nights out I've had have been after funerals.

When I left school I took the first job that was offered to me, which was catering in a nursing home. I ended up working there for 5 years during which there was a steady turnover of residents as one by one they shuffled off this mortal coil and others moved into the home. In my first year of working there an old couple made a big impression on me. Horace & Esther were probably well into their 80's and were newly weds. They'd met a few years earlier, fallen in love & got married. They lived in the nursing home in the room opposite one of my kitchens in the only room with a double bed rather than a hospital bed as they both had mobility problems and Esther had a bad heart. They were very funny together and a favourite of the nursing staff. One morning when I'd worked there for about 6 months an ambulance had to be called as Horace was in terrible pain. He was taken into hospital where he died the same day. Esther was devastated. Over the week that followed the nursing staff had to spend a lot of time with her consoling her and just keeping her company. On the day of his funeral the home was filled with their families and Esther put on her best suit and was taken to say goodbye to her husband. The next day when the nursing staff went to get her out of bed they discovered that she'd died in her sleep. It was as if she'd just been waiting until she knew he was safely tucked in, then she checked out herself.
A strange notion - for an 18 year old - that you could have some say in when you die, but one I saw a few times whilst I was there.

So how do I feel about my own death? How does my own mortality sit on my shoulders? Well, I'd like to deserve a well-attended funeral and positive obituary. I'm not sure that I'd get them now so would rather not die just yet. I think I'm ok with the fact that I will die, but I'm not really looking forward to the possibility of one of any number of nasty ailments that could finish me off in old age – if I live that long. And after my funeral I want those who attended it to go to the pub and have more than one drink. I want them to raise a toast; not to me – I'll be dead – but to themselves to celebrate the years they've out-lived me by.

Chain Reaction - The Prequel: God & Slavery

2011-08-14T14:00:00.002+01:00

Originally published September 2007

On March 10th 1983 MTV premiered Michael Jackson's song 'Billie Jean'. From the perspective of 2007 that may seem only note-worthy because it remains one of Jackson's biggest hits, but it actually is an event of huge cultural significance and another nail in the coffin of the legacy that slavery left behind it. Slavery was abolished in 1833 in the UK and 1865 in the US, so how does Michael Jackson singing about a nutter stalker whilst dancing around like he needs a wee affect anything?

Unsurprisingly the slave trade had a devastating effect on Africa. We can only estimate how many Africans were taken into slavery; the highest estimate I've seen is 20 million people. These people would have been fit & healthy, at the prime of their lives. They should have been working for their own families and communities. Instead of which they were taken to work for the benefit of another country, and all their descendants were lost to Africa also. The removal of such numbers would have meant that agricultural land couldn't be cultivated properly, and this would have affected the basis for economic development that the African countries had. Many slaves were given by the tribe leaders to the traders in exchange for guns. The presence of guns changed and escalated the wars between tribes and lead to further loss of life and further crippled Africa's development and potential trade. At this time when Africa could have formed a basis for trade with Europe and America, its workforce was stolen. Many of the economic problems faced by modern day Africa can be traced back to the slave trade and how we treated African citizens.

The legacy of slavery is also felt in the countries where the slaves were taken. Slavery was abolished around the world over the course of many years. Often very reluctantly slaves were freed and Governments compensated the former owners for their losses. But the slaves themselves were often no better off. They were given nothing. They were free, but in name only. Most had no option but to continue in the employment of their former masters. They were paid for their labour, but often the pay they were given was pitifully small and barely covered the rent on the accommodation their former masters provided them with. The law still treated former slaves as second-class citizens, and with the vast majority of them unable to read and write and no education on offer to them they lacked the basic skills needed to escape from the poverty they faced. The emancipation of the slaves created a massive underclass that was slave in all but name.

Over and above this dreadful poverty, the ex-slaves had to contend with people's prejudices. The slave trade had relied on people believing that the Africans were sub-human, not worth the same as them and therefore it was perfectly alright to treat them as badly as they did. Even the British abolitionists weren't immune from this attitude; the black abolitionists were never invited to speak at the meetings of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. When they were asked to attend functions they were seated apart from the white supporters. While laws across the world changed and made slavery illegal it was much harder to change people's hearts and minds. What had been the problem of slavery fast became the problem of racism, and the economic & social disadvantages that the ex-slaves faced seemed to add weight to the belief that the Africans were less intelligent and less human than the white population. In the Southern states of the US the black population became subject to laws of segregation that lasted until the 1960's. These laws governed all walks of life – job entitlement, eating in restaurants, riding on a bus, mortgage eligibility – an ensured that the ex-slave population was prevented from escaping poverty. It provided institutional support for injustice and against this the Ku-Klux-Klan was able to pursue its course of violence and murder in its struggle to prevent black economic advancement, education and voting rights. Right across the world and right up to the present day ex-slave populations have had to fight for the right to be treated as equal in the countries they live in.

So what of Michael Jackson? How does he fit in? Well, in 1983 Michael Jackson was black. The Jacksons had become international phenomena and were rich beyond their wildest dreams. Their musical prowess had elevated them far above their impoverished origins and their story had become an inspiration to black communities across America struggling against poverty and discrimination. When Michael went solo his music was guaranteed a huge audience.

But it wasn't guaranteed much exposure. Despite Billie Jean being at number one in the singles charts for seven weeks there was one major avenue that remained closed. The spectacle of Jackson trying to ease his bladder problem was kept off what was fast becoming an increasingly influential marketing tool. MTV refused to air, not only Jackson's videos, but all videos by black performers. Jackson was signed to Epic, which is a subsidiary of CBS – a huge record label – and it took CBS president Walter Yetnikoff threatening to refuse MTV permission to play any of it's white artists (which included Ozzy Osbourne & Billy Joel) and denounce the channel as racist to make MTV yield. And so on March 10th 1983 Jackson became the first black artist to be played on MTV. 1983, that's only 24 years ago. I find it hard to believe that the aftermath of slavery could have been demonstrated so blatantly so recently, but the evidence is there. The evidence and the legacy of the slave trade is all around us. As much as we try to ignore it, it remains. There have been many programmes created to make reparations to the African countries and deal with the bad taste in the mouth that slavery's left, but these need to continue and we need to be a part of that process.

Holy Ice Caps: God & the climate.

2011-06-12T13:36:00.000+01:00

Originally published in June 2007

Years ago when Helen & I still lived in Harrogate we went to Knaresborough for the evening and we went to feed the ducks. We went to a little viewing platform dug out of the riverbank along the small waterside road and hunted for hungry looking birds to take the bread we'd brought them. Except we were too late, as it was nearing dusk the ducks had gone to roost for the night and the river was bare. So we contented ourselves with sitting on a bench watching the lazy driftwood float past. We'd been sitting there for a short while when we noticed a mouse sticking it's nose out from a little hole in the wall, so we decided that as there were no ducks to feed we'd feed the mouse. We gently tossed a small piece of bread in the direction of the mouse's hole and after a short while it crept out, picked the bread up and carried it back to it's hole. After repeating the process a couple of times we decided to lay a trail of bread between the mousehole and where we were sitting in order to see how close to us the mouse would dare to come. We watched it come and go fetching chunks of bread back to it's hole and gradually coming closer and closer to where Helen & I were sitting when something unexpected happened. 4 people came down the stairs onto the platform. They were 2 men & 2 women, they looked as if they'd been on a business dinner, but maybe they hadn't. They walked to the far end of the platform, stood for a few minutes (possibly looking for ducks) then turned and went. In their curt businesslike manner they barely acknowledged that Helen & I were on the platform let alone noticed our mouse. They didn't even notice the remainders of the trail of bread and trampled it. After they left the mouse didn't emerge, so we too left and probably went to the pub.

I remember being quite cross about those people and their attitude to nature. They wanted to see ducks, and if ducks weren't there then there was nothing to see, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that it wasn't just their problem.

Ever since Humankind have walked on 2 legs we have invented and developed and improved life for ourselves, over the last 100 years the rate of change has grown exponentially. As time has rolled on we have congregated more and more into towns and cities and distanced ourselves from Nature developing more 'sophisticated' ways of earning a living. Only a minority of people in this country now engage with nature to earn a living, and the majority of those are working in the tourist industry. We have sought to separate ourselves from our planet. We have built concrete cities and industrial sprawl and pushed the natural world so far out of view that the most some of us engage with it is when we reach for the can of flyspray because a wasp's come in through an open window. As we have developed Nature has been something we've needed to conquer. We've needed to work against it to reach our goals and as much as possible we have dominated and altered the environment to suit our ends. We have seen the natural resources that the planet has to offer and we've taken what we need. And now we don't need to give the world we live in a second thought because we live in cities with running water, supermarkets, electric lights and pest control firms. If we want nature we want it on our terms. We can go to the zoo, play golf, go fishing, watch a David Attenborough program or find some ducks to feed.

But this is where we've gone so badly wrong; we've come to believe that we don't need Nature. We live on a planet that we ignore. We've always done as we please with our planet and we will continue to do so, but due to a fast expanding world population & Western consumerism we're beginning to realise that we can't. Our disregard for the planet we depend on for our lives is beginning to bear its bitter fruit. Climate Change is the big problem we now face, but there are many examples of our mis-management of our world that have ended in problems for us; for example at some point in the last 50 years it was decided that instead of feeding cows on grass money could be saved by feeding them the crushed up and processed carcasses of other cows and farm animals. About 15 years ago it was noticed that cows seemed to be suffering from a disease very similar to kuru, which is a disease that was observed in the early 1900's in cannibalistic tribes in New Guinea and in turn is very similar to CJD, which humans can contract by eating meat from cows infected with BSE.

What would happen if you and your family decided that you were no longer going to use the bins in your house? Instead of throwing your rubbish away sensibly you were just going to drop it on the floor, and instead of washing up after a meal you'd just scrape your pots and pans onto a table. What if you decided that instead of using a toilet you'd just do your dirty business in whatever room you happened to be in? How long would it be until your house began to smell? How long until it became uninhabitable? And yet we continue to pollute and deplete natural resources on a global scale. Conservationists have often been seen as wacky sentimentalist hippy tree-huggers, but in the light of the devastation that Climate Change could wreak on the planet there is a quote by Gerald Durrell (who was a famous conservationist even if you've never heard of him) that has new poignancy. He said, "Many people think that conservation is just about saving fluffy animals – what they don't realise is that we're trying to prevent the Human Race from committing suicide."

We need to be very careful about the solutions we pick as we look to tackling Climate Change. Everything we do affects the environment. One solution currently being touted is using Bio-diesel to fuel our cars. On the scale it is currently being used it is making a positive contribution to halting Climate Change, but if we all converted to bio-diesel there wouldn't be enough arable farmland to meet the needs for maize to convert and run our cars. Huge amounts of land currently used for food production would be converted to bio-diesel production and still more land would be needed. Rainforests and ancient woodlands would feel the axe in our quest to keep our cars on the road, releasing millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere totally negating the benefits of using bio-fuels.

Unless we change our perspective on Nature we'll continue to lurch from environmental precipice to environmental precipice. We desperately need to re-engage with our planet and view it as a whole – if I stamp on your toe it's your mouth that says, "Ouch!" We need to learn just how much destruction of rainforests on the other side of the planet affects us. We need to learn how to live sustainably, working with Nature so that we can guarantee the health of the planet down subsequent generations. We need to learn to treat the planets riches in a less utilitarian manner – Nature isn't here for our convenience and we aren't separate from it; if the ducks have all gone to bed chances are there'll be something else to enjoy.

Strident Trident.

2011-05-08T13:30:00.000+01:00

Originally published May 2007

I remember the day when I got my first electric guitar. I think I was about 14 or 15 and my Mum had got me a second hand strat copy from a local music shop. Except that being my Mum she had no intention of getting me an amp as well, but the guy in the music shop told her that I could plug into the mic input of my Dad's hi-fi as long as I kept the volume on the guitar very low. I only ever got to play music on my Dad's hi-fi when he was out, so I was really amazed when he said I could plug my guitar into it. I spent the evening trying to strum the few chords I knew and play 'smoke on the water' & 'House of the rising sun' but there was a problem. My guitar was picking up radio signals. I ignored it best I could but I felt really torn. The radio broadcast was of the US and USSR signing an agreement to scrap long-range nuclear missiles. I knew it was a historic day and I should take note of what was going on, but I wanted to play with my new toy.

The generations that grew up between the Second World War and the collapse of communism grew up with a constant threat of nuclear war. Incidents like the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis heightened tensions between the Eastern Bloc and NATO and seemed to prove the need for countries to arm themselves with nuclear weapons to deter the possibility of a nuclear strike.It was against this climate that the original trident program was conceived to much controversy in the early 1980's. Now in 2007 the British Government has renewed the Trident missile system. More than 90 Labour MP's voted against this and the bill was only passed with support from Conservative MP's. There were also many campaigns against the renewing of Trident from various organisations and members of the public.

One of the reasons for opposing the renewal of Trident is that it seems to go against the nuclear non-proliferation treaties that were signed beginning with the one that was signed the day I got my first electric guitar. The powers that held nuclear weapons agreed to end the arms race and moderate the ownership of these weapons of mass destruction, now Britain has committed itself to buying more missiles.
But who now is the enemy? The Soviet Union no longer exists, the Russian Confederation is an ally and some of the former Soviet states are now members of the EU. Who are we considering might be such a threat that we feel we may still need to use a nuclear weapon? Such weapons are useless in the war against terror. The network of terrorists isn't based in one country or region. During the 2002 war in Afghanistan pictures were broadcast on the news of allied bomb strikes on al-Qaeda training camps. All they showed was multi-million pound bombs and missiles blowing up empty acres of sand. To use a nuclear missile against a target that has no territory necessitates blowing up a huge area of a third party's land. Holding such weapons gives us no advantage at all against enemies such as these.

Argument was also made that there would be economic hardship caused by not renewing Trident. Barrow in Cumbria – where the Trident submarines are made – is an area of economic hardship, and not to renew Trident would cause more unemployment and further poverty in a town already much in need of regeneration and investment. This has to be one of the most ridiculous arguments I heard for the renewal of trident as if it weren't renewed there would be a huge pot of money available to spend: more than enough to invest in Barrow and prevent the predicted social deprivation.

But is there an alternative to renewing Trident? I don't mean an alternative weapons system that would afford us the same level of 'protection'. I mean is there an alternative to spending such huge sums of money to prevent terrorism and other acts of aggression towards us? Is there a way that reflects Christian Love and Compassion, a way in which we can see God's reflection? I believe there is.

I think the West has to make big apologies to many other states and cultures and seek forgiveness for past aggression. We have a history of bludgeoning our way around the world and dominating and subjugating foreign places and this is what is now coming back to bite us. Our political leaders and Captains of Industry have invaded, oppressed and exploited all corners of the world and forced Western values as completely as we can. Our biggest success in this is the US. European 'settlers' took such control of a 'new' country at the expense of the Native American population to the extent that it is the settlers' descendants that are now running the US and the Native American population is almost off the radar.If we want to really protect ourselves and make the world a safer place then we need to listen to what other cultures are telling us and address their grievances. We need to actually make peace with nations rather than just make sure that we're stronger than them. We need to take real steps to end poverty and stop the exploitation that's carried out in our name. We need to judge ourselves, judge our history, then do what is right and do justice by all those we have previously aggrieved.

Politicians will never do this though. It is a long-term strategy and political parties only think as far as the next general election. They tell us that it would be too expensive. True it would cost a lot of money, but in the long term it would save billions of dollars currently being spent on weaponry and it would save countless lives in this country and across the world. Politicians will never do this because it is a much more difficult route than simply spending billions of pounds on a weapons system which a massive proportion of the electorate don't want.

Slavery.

2011-03-12T13:26:00.000Z

Originally published in March 2007

Hot on the heels of the Big Brother racism row, channel 4 found itself mired in controversy again in January because of comments made by one of the contestants on it's 'shipwrecked' program. Lucy Buchanan (18) from Edinburgh caused over 500 complaints from viewers and forced Channel 4 to axe the repeat showing of the first episode of the series by saying that she supported slavery. "I'm for slavery," she said. "But that's never going to come back."

Several British newspapers picked up the story and the Commission for Racial Equality was "keeping shipwrecked under review." Lucy's own parents issued a statement to "Wholeheartedly apologise," for her remarks.

But as admirable the public outcry at such an outrageous statement is it has missed a vital point in the story. It is actually impossible to bring back slavery. There is a large amount of legislation across the international community and many UN conventions dealing with slavery in all its forms: but they're not what make it impossible to bring slavery back. It's impossible to bring slavery back because it's never gone away.

Although the slave trade was abolished 200 years ago people trafficking still continues. Somewhere around a million people are trafficked every year. 80% are women and girls, 50% are minors. Trafficking being illegal these people end up being sold into illegal industries; prostitution, forced labour, forced marriage or adoption, forced military service being some examples

But the main form of modern slavery is Bonded Slavery. This is where a person is tricked into taking out a loan when their only collateral is their labour. They are then forced to work until they pay the debt off, but the terms of repayment are harsh and the work is tough and often the debt is never repaid. Sometimes the debt is transferable down subsequent generations condemning children and grandchildren into a life of bonded slavery. It is reckoned that this form of slavery affects about 20 million people internationally.

Anti-slavery organisations reckon that there are around 27 million people in slavery around the world today. That's more than there was 200 years ago. At the height of the legal slave trade an average slave in the American South would have cost $40,000 in modern money; today a slave costs an average of just $90.
But how can this happen in the 21st Century? Why is this being allowed to continue? Firstly, because it's illegal. Long gone are the days when you could just turn up at Liverpool docks with a boat full of people in chains and manacles without attracting the attention of customs and excise. Likewise you can't set up a stall on Altrincham market (somewhere between the fishmongers and the watch battery stall) and sell children. Because buying and selling of people is illegal it has to happen secretively and the trade has been taken over by the criminal underworld. People trafficking is the most visible form of slavery – and that goes on largely un-noticed. Forced marriages & adoptions are difficult to prove, most slaves have been taken from the poorest strata of societies; some have been abducted but some sold by their families, some are runaways or street children, some families are tricked into giving children away. A large proportion of slaves are people that no one will miss, so who's going to raise the alarm?
Secondly you and I support slavery. Through a long complex history of economics and cultural development we have arrived at a situation where the western way of life depends on slavery. Very briefly we in the west demand lots of cheap goods from all over the world. Producers in the poorest countries of the world need to be able to compete with commodity prices set by the highly subsidised western industries and in order to be able to do this they need to cut labour costs as much as possible. Using slave labour is often the solution they employ.

200 years ago the Christian Church was at the forefront of the movement to abolish the slave trade. It's time we picked up the baton and fought for the rights of all those still held in the bondage of slavery. Our faith calls on us to be champions of the oppressed and to stand up against injustice. We need to be aware of what we buy and the effects it has on those who made it. Rather than not buying products we should try to ensure that they have been ethically produced. There are several schemes in place through different industries that give us that guarantee. We have to be prepared to pay slightly more for the goods we buy so that others don't have to pay a higher price for our comfort.

"I tell you the truth, whatever you did for the least of my brothers you did for me."

What's love got to do with it?

2011-02-12T13:18:00.000Z

Origianally published in Feb 2007

Valentines day gets me to thinking about Human relationships and what they're all about. And it seems to me to be a very strange sphere of Human experience and one I don't fully understand. I don't understand why people are willing to become so involved with another person, as to do so guarantees that at some point you are going to get very hurt. People fall out and break each other's hearts, love turns to hate and people do all they can to cause as much damage as they can to those they once would have protected with their lives. People become incapacitated by injury or illness and their significant other's life is spent caring for them. If a couple has children there's even more scope for hurt: children are clumsy idiots who are always falling into lawn mowers or picking up all sorts of bad habits. Even if a couple were to have a successful marriage and perfect children the day will come when one of them will die and leave the other in grief and mourning. Sooner or later someone will get hurt. It would appear that the only way to avoid such pain in your life is to either abstain from getting involved with other people at all or make sure you die before your loved one(s).

It seems to me that the whole thing can be boiled down to a simple process. Next time you're getting your bra straps twanged or nursing an unwanted erection during a maths lesson just remember that it's all to do with the survival of the species. The logical conclusion to dating and courtship, marriage and family life is having children. And there's even more pain if a couple discovers that for whatever reason they can't have children. If you look round the animal kingdom you'll see that there are animals that have monogamous life long partnerships, but many more manage to procreate without such emotional attachments or high degree of social contact, so why do we willingly put ourselves through such hassle and torment if there's an alternative?

Is there an alternative? We need to continue to think in practical anthropological terms for the moment to prove the need for the emotions. When 2 people come together and form a partnership they gain strength from each other and are able to support each other through whatever life throws at them. This is a really important factor. If we look through the animal kingdom we see that most animals' parenting is done over a relatively short period – none at all in the case of most fish up to maybe a couple of years for some other animals. For us it's around 20 years before we reach adulthood and independence from our parents. The bringing up of children is a very demanding task and much easier for two parents. That's not to say that single parents don't make good parents, simply that it's never an easy option. Our children are so demanding on us that virtually alone in the animal kingdom we enlist the help of Grandparents to help us raise our offspring.

Extending our thoughts beyond the nuclear family we observe that we are a social animal. We make emotional bonds with many others outside our family. We have friendships, join clubs and have allegiances and loyalties. We love not just our life partner, but many people. We become bonded to many things – football teams, pubs, bands, charitable organisations and causes. These bonds make us want the best for whatever it is we're bonded to and other people involved with it and we alter different factors of our lifestyle for the mutual benefit of ourselves and our cause. Where our lives overlap with other people's lives and their lives overlap with others beyond our joint interest we create a whole network of friendships and a fellowship in which we all play a part and abide by (a bit like MySpace!).

And there we have a microcosm of society. The ripples of a community of people who out of regard for their fellows co-operate and respect each other's boundaries can echo outwards and be amplified many times over until we encapsulate the whole of humankind. On this large scale we can see where these bonds of love work and where they break down as well as the repercussions of both. Without making these bonds and living by them individually we would struggle and society would disintegrate into every man for himself.

So we can see that a healthy society is one where the bond of love between people is the governing factor. The more the rule of law has to be used to set boundaries and dictate morality the unhealthier that society is. It is up to us as individuals to decide our place in society – whether we respect or reject those around us.

This picture of society is a reflection of our interaction with God. Religion teaches us that God is Love. The bible says that, "We love because God first loved us," and that love has been demonstrated by the death and resurrection of Jesus. We need to decide if we believe that God is real and then make another decision; about what we do with that knowledge. We can ignore it and do our own thing; we can obey what we see as God's will because we think we have no choice or we can choose to willingly forge bonds and seek friendship with God.

So is this then a definition of love? An emotional bond between people voluntarily given which brings forth feelings of loyalty, protectiveness, passion, pleasure and general goodwill. Sometimes that love is reciprocated sometimes it is not. Sometimes that love is deserved, sometimes not.

What can we conclude about Love and the part it plays in Human life? We have to conclude that it is a totally normal and necessary experience. That we Humans need to forge deep emotional bonds with people close to us, and that to not do so makes us half a person. To find someone who becomes a life partner is a true blessing.

Find someone who has lost a partner and ask them a question. Ask them if they had the choice would they share again the time they had with their partner and go through the pain of loss, or not have the pain of loss but forfeit their relationship with their loved one.

Pass it on: God & Heritage

2010-12-12T19:34:00.000Z

Pass it on: God & Heritage from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

So we come to the last blog I’m writing for Cafe Sundae. And it’s a good topic to end on. I am thinking about heritage and I have one word to say to you – floorboards. What do floorboards have to do with heritage? I’ll tell you shortly.
I think if you mentioned Christian Heritage or the heritage of the Church to most people they’d think about the fantastic buildings we have as cathedrals, or the many paintings or pieces of music that have been produced throughout 2000 years of Church History. And why not? They are a testament to how people’s faith has inspired and motivated them. They are arguably amongst the greatest and most beautiful things Humankind has produced and are quite rightly revered and preserved for future generations to enjoy. But that’s not the heritage I want to talk about, I want to talk about floorboards. And tattoos.

Let’s start with tattoos and hopefully you’ll begin to see what I want to put on the table for your consideration.
I don’t actually want to think about tattoos; just one particular one, and it’s one you can find on my left arm. Between my elbow and shoulder I have a large tattoo of a cross and around it are the words “I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye.” The words are actually taken from Pink Floyd’s ‘comfortably numb’, but coupled with the cross it provides a statement about my faith. It speaks to me of a God who is present and involved in our world and our lives, a God who reveals Himself to us in bite-sized pieces. So we catch our glimpse of God (spell it with a little g if you want to consider this from an agnostic/atheist standpoint) and we can choose to take our facet and talk with other people about their glimpses, and as we widen our conversation we put pieces together like a jigsaw and develop a picture of who God is (or what god is) and build a faith. My tattoo speaks to me of the importance of looking for God and sharing what we find with others.

Ok then, let’s think about floorboards and what they say to me about our heritage. Cafe Sundae has been held at Timperley Methodist Church. In 2004 the Church was refurbished. The pews that were previously in the Church were removed and replaced with the rows of chairs that we move every month to make way for Cafe Sundae. Before the new carpet could be laid the entire floor had new boards laid over the top of the old ones because of the state of the floorboards. The procession of people week after week shuffling into and out of the pews every Sunday, coming together to meet as believers, had worn grooves into the floor making a surface too undulating to lay a carpet on. 60 years of people shuffling down the pews to take their seats, 3 or 4 generations of believers who have come together to share time and their experiences, to build a bigger picture of God than they could do alone. Imagine how grooved the floorboards are in older churches. This is the heritage I want to consider; these 2000 years of feet shuffling through pews, generation meeting generation to build their jigsaw; discussing their fleeting glimpses, sharing their picture of God, creating a living moving, evolving faith.
And here we are at the end of the chain, the last links. It’s our job to make sure that we don’t remain that way, that the procession of feet continues to wear the floorboards. The heritage we have is an oral tradition - it’s true we have the Bible to look to, but without our chain-making the Bible simply becomes Aesop’s Fables. This then is what Cafe Sundae has been about. We’ve tried to pass on what we have seen of God, we’ve tried to find out who we are in God’s world. We’ve tried to share our fleeting glimpses and piece together what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century.

And as we 4 step back and go onto other things, we throw down the gauntlet to you. If you have gained anything from being a member of a Christian Community have you got anything you can pass on? Are you happy to be the last link in the chain, and if not how are you going to make sure that you aren’t?

Minted: God & Cash

2010-11-14T19:25:00.003Z

Minted: God & Cash from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

I'm sure a lot of you will have noticed how much difference it makes to a child when they learn to read. It's incredible to see the change it makes; suddenly the world opens up to them. They learn more than just a new skill, they gain a massive amount of independence, and with that they get confidence and a whole new world opens up to them as these lines, dots and squiggles reveal their secrets. Previously they'd managed ok, with help from people around them who can read, but now when they don't need that help all sorts of possibilities reveal themselves and life takes on whole new dimensions.

I think that trying to live without money would be like that. It would be possible, but very, very difficult. You would have to rely a lot on other people. All sorts of doors would be closed to you and you would be cut off from a large part of life as you now know it. Money is a very necessary part of life and that is undeniable; but money also has a dark side.

People can get too attached to the idea of money. Whether they have any or not money can become the holy grail for people at the expense of other things – people will take higher paid jobs they know they will hate purely for the extra money, people can become selfish and greedy and can do the most dreadful things to other people in pursuit of an extra pound. People often say that money is the root of all evil, that is a mis-quote. They should say that love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, but that's not as snappy.

I have to say that the whole financial system leaves me with a mixture of feelings. Firstly boredom. I don't have an interest in the financial markets and only engage in that world out of necessity – mortgage, insurance, bank account etc. I strongly dislike the international monetary systems that prevail in keeping the rich rich to the cost of the majority of the world, which is kept in poverty by the decisions of a few men who control trade.

In 1998 the Governor of the band of England at the time – Sir Eddie George - said in a radio interview the high levels of unemployment in the North East was a price worth paying for low inflation across the country. Well, Mr George, try telling that to the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their livelihoods, try telling that to the families who struggle to put food on the table. Try telling that to those who have lost their homes because they can't afford to pay their mortgages any more. I think his comment brings the crux of the problem to the fore. Money, surely, is supposed to serve man. Man isn't supposed to serve money, and yet here and in many other instances we are used as pawns of the financial markets. Real human lives are used to support and benefit an abstract concept, an unjust system, a folly.

It bugs me somewhat the gravitas that the financial news is reported with .At the moment the money markets are looking rather precarious and downturns in the economies of the west will have repercussions globally and will cost lives in the developing world. But the news is reported as if the events are unavoidable, like a natural disaster. Earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes are unavoidable catastrophes; financial market crashes are evidence that the system we have created doesn't work and we're not willing to fix it.
I don't understand how we can create and then continue to support a system in which everyone can lose. How come when there is stock markets crash millions of pounds/dollars/yen etc. can simply disappear? The money was there at the beginning of the day, where is it now?

Ok, I don't understand the financial markets, I don't like the way trade works and I want to see things done differently. What can I do about it? The political will to change the way things work simply doesn't exist, so there's very little I can practically do to change the big picture. But what I can do is be careful with my money. I have to use my money just like I'd like the financial institutions to use theirs. I have to do my best to make sure my money and spending doesn't adversely affect others. I need to think about the implications of my spending and avoid unethical spending. I need to use my consumer powers to demonstrate to the wider world where my priorities lie. With this issue more than to quote Mahatma Ghandi I need to, "Be the change you want to see in the world."

I don't believe it: God & God

2010-10-10T19:20:00.001+01:00

I don't believe it: God & God from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

For those of you who haven't seen the Simpsons movie – WHERE'VE YOU BEEN! Very early on in the film Lisa meets a boy named Colin. He's Irish and the son of a musician ("He's not Bono.") and Lisa falls in love with him. When she gets home she excitedly tells Marge all about him whilst Marge is scrubbing pig footprints off the floor. "Oh wait. I didn't tell you the best part. He loves the environment. Oh wait. I still didn't tell you the best part – he's got an Irish brogue. No, no wait wait, I still didn't tell you the best part. HE"S NOT IMAGINARY!"

I've sat for ages thinking about how I can write a blog on God's existence and I've drawn a blank. It's impossible to either prove or disprove whether God exists or not as for every argument there is a counter argument. Look at any one of the many online forums about belief and you will find countless disagreements between atheists and believers who are all trying and failing to reason out their viewpoint, and it's the same old arguments going round and round and round. So all I can offer to this debate is my idea of who God is and hope that my experience makes you think.

I've never really doubted God's existence, but I am sometimes a reluctant believer. I do sometimes catch myself thinking how much easier life would be if I didn't believe in God; how much time I'd free up if I didn't have to do Church stuff or how little responsibility I'd have to take for my actions. When I was a teenager I had a revelation of God which caused me to stop ignoring my belief, but it had always been there. This was in a real way a 'conversion experience' and it turned me away from my agnostic apathy towards God and started me searching to find who and where he is.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s I used to attend a group for people my age and we'd discuss our Faith. We'd all come from the same Church background and when we began to discuss our ideas of who God is were pretty similar. But as time went on and we left school and got jobs our lives changed and our experience of God changed. Our ideas started differing with others when we discussed and we had some real disagreements. After each meeting those of us who were old enough went to the pub where we'd sometimes continue the debate or just chat. I realized over time that although our theologies now differed sometimes quite widely and we argued when we discussed it didn't affect our friendships and it didn't seem to affect the strength of our faiths. This got me to thinking about God and I concluded that God is bigger than our theological differences and can cope with them. So maybe it doesn't matter if I believe in – for example – creation or evolution. Maybe God isn't particularly interested in where we stand on divorce or predestination. He's simply interested in us.
And that's how I've approached my belief in God since then. I've tried to keep an open mind on what God is like and hear what other people have to say.

If you think about it, it makes sense that we believe different things about God. We all will have differing experiences of him. To my bosses at work I'm the reliable capable fountain of all knowledge; to my underling I'm the demanding line manager who keeps making him do his work again because it's not up to standard; to my parents I'm the Son they're very proud of but they still remember the times when I wet the bed, fell off my bike, threw temper tantrums in shops or hid under my bed after Dr Who because I was scared of Dalecs; to Helen I'm the useless husband who makes a mess, steals the duvet and can't do DIY for love or money. These people's opinions of me all differ because they come into contact with me in differing contexts, but I'm the same person. And as we all have our own personalities our own lives and our own needs the ways in which we come into contact with God is going to be different and we will all form different ideas about who he is; that doesn't make any of us right or wrong automatically, and everyone's experiences and opinions of God should be given a hearing. Just as someone may tell you something about me that you don't agree with ("Are you sure that was Rob? It doesn't sound like the Rob I know.") so we may disagree with someone else's opinion of God.

So who do I think God is? Here is the sum total of my belief, the essence of my search for God so far. All I've found can be summed up in this sentence. God is Love. I believe that God's Love is the creating power behind the universe, it's God's Love that binds the universe together, and provides all the resources we need to survive. It's God's love that keeps us searching for Him and he for us. It's the overriding factor to all of our lives. Many people's experiences of God are governed by strict rules and regulations governing how we act and who we are and come complete with a long list of 'thou shalt not's. But I believe that God filled the World with millions of possibilities for us to enjoy ourselves. I believe he wants us to live life as fully as we can, exploring the limits of our humanity and smile and laugh and enjoy ourselves as we do it. I believe God has a great sense of humour and wants us to use ours as we search for our place in the world and place in his Kingdom. God loves to see us happy and loves us to acknowledge Him in our happiness. God's Love is over all. This then is the acid test for any religion or believer: if they're not motivated by Love, they're not motivated by God.

Beautiful Mind – God and Difference

2010-09-09T09:39:00.005+01:00

Beautiful Mind: God & difference from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

To paraphrase a café sundae meeting, one of the reasons I was asked to write a blog every month for the services is because I look at things differently to most people. I think the phrase used was that I "approach things from a different angle." It was seen as a positive thing that my cock-eyed view could make a valuable contribution to what café sundae is trying to achieve.

But being that little bit different hasn't always been a positive thing.

I didn't really get on that well at school. The formal education system didn't agree with me and I don't think many teachers knew how to get the best out of me. It didn't help that the subjects that were offered to me to study didn't particularly interest me. I went to school in Harrogate, which everyone tells me is a lovely town. But it is a small town and a conservative town and the range of subjects offered at the schools there didn't extend much beyond maths, English, sciences and languages. One of the other secondary schools in the town offered PE as a GCSE subject and I was amazed when I found that out – although why anyone would want a GCSE in running round a muddy field in the rain whilst being shouted at by a gorilla in a tracksuit was beyond me. I didn't stand out at anything at school, I was – and still am - crap at sports and although I am intelligent I was in a class full of people cleverer than me who worked really hard. I just cruised through school doing just enough work to get passes in my subjects in order to keep off the teachers' radars as much as possible. I never really fitted in and I never really found out why.

I did have a good set of friends, although again because I was just that little bit different I stood out just enough to be the butt of people's jokes from time to time. A big bone of contention was my tastes in music. I remember my friends' tastes were always a couple of years behind mine. When I was 12 I discovered heavy metal – the heavier the better. I loved bands like slayer, gravedigger and venom along with iron maiden, motorhead and all the rest. My friends were still listening to pop and chart music and on certain occasions made their feelings on my tastes well known to me! A couple of years later they discovered heavy metal and I lent them lots the music I had collected, but my tastes had moved on and I was listening to Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin & Jimi Hendrix. Although they were happy to borrow albums from me they were also happy to express their disapproval at what I was then listening to. Again a couple of years after that they discovered Pink Floyd and the cycle continued.

It was once I left school that I began to find the things I could do well. I got involved in the local Youth for Christ centre and started playing in bands with other people and discovered that it was something I could do – both the playing bit and the messing around with PA's and recording bit. I even started attending bible studies and I discovered I was good at thinking – something I'd never even contemplated doing throughout my formal education – and fairly soon realised my opinions were valued, sometimes even sought after.

I slowly found my niche as I discovered my strengths. I realised that the things that made me different at school and had caused me difficulties were the things that I now enjoyed and I was good at. My idiosyncrasies are a fundamental part of who I am and what I do. Forward fast to today and these things that set me apart have become skills few people possess which keep me busy – sometimes too busy – providing services for people. I have made a career and a life out of my peculiarities. I'm not under any illusions, there were people at school who thought I was an idiot loser and there are people now that think the same, but I've found that my quirks are in demand; and I'm happy with that!

Now as I look back at my time at school I have the gift of hindsight. Sometimes when I was at school I used to try to fit in more, now I'm glad that I didn't. If I had the opportunity to do it all again would I do it differently? If I were going to be a responsible youth leader I'd say if I did it again I'd work harder and try to get better grades. But in truth I wouldn't. I would hate to have to do it again because I hated it first time round, but I wouldn't do it differently. What I was then – with all its difficulties and awkwardness – has led to who I am now. Had I done things differently, had I compromised who I was in order to fit in more, had I tried to be popular I wouldn't be where I am now, I wouldn't have found these things I do that I enjoy and are in demand and I wouldn't be writing a blog every month for café Sundae.

Goal! God & Football

2010-06-13T19:20:00.003+01:00

GOOOAAAL!! God & Football from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

I suck at football.

On every level.

I am generally appalling at playing sport as I used my asthma as an excuse to get out of as much of it as possible when I was at school, football is no exception – I’m a right-footed player with 2 left feet. But also I come from a non-sport-watching family and so the football seed was never planted and I can’t see anything in the game to muster that excitement for any one team now. If I were pressed I’d say I’m anyone-but-united, but that’s mainly because, living in Sale, the trams are a nightmare when they’re playing a home game.

So the world cup? It doesn’t really bother me that much. I’ll watch a few games, but I’ll miss a lot more. I never even go out of my way to make sure I see England games. I will enjoy the good atmosphere in the country while we’re in the competition, and the opportunity to go to the pub is always welcomed, but I refuse to become one of those people who are whipped up into a month long frenzy of patriotic fervour over something I couldn’t give 2 hoots about for the rest of the time. So I write my blog from the position of an impassive observer.

Having now alienated ¾ of my readership I will continue.

Let’s not watch football; let’s watch the people watching football. I’ve met some – they’re quite interesting.
I’ve always been quite impressed with the way commentators can reel off facts and figures about when the last time team A beat team B and how the centre back has worn his vest tucked into his lucky pants for the last however many matches his team has played at whatever ground and how many of those occasions his team has won. But then I remind myself that it's their job to 'know' things about the teams playing and they've been studying stats in books for weeks before the game. Much more impressive is your common or garden football fan being able to do the same thing mid-conversation in the pub. And lots of them can do it – they have enough information stored away about every seasons starting line-ups and goal differences to start a small library (one of those ones that gets driven round in a large van). Regardless of their formal education and academic record, facts about football seem to stick. Football is something that people get passionate about, and that passion can be used for great things.
There is a basketball court in the park at the back of our house. 9 times out of 10 when you look out at people using it, they’re playing football. Providing a play area where people can play football is a very simple way of alleviating the complaint that teenagers often make – that there’s nothing for them to do. I know people who organise youth teams in ‘problem’ areas and it gives those young people an aim and a focus, it doesn’t just lessen the boredom. Life in some of the more poverty stricken areas of our country can be very insular as lack of cash keeps the population immobile, but football can be a relatively cheap way of raising the heads of the young people in these places and giving them hope. Football is used to raise awareness of issues. There is an annual homeless world cup where the players are all homeless. Last year 48 nations took part; this year’s competition is being held in Rio de Janeiro in September. There was also a Gaza world cup held earlier this year to raise awareness of the humanitarian situation there.

But if football at the grass roots level can be a force for good, how is that reflected at the highest levels? Surely on the international stage football could change the world! I have to say that here is where it disappoints me. At the first level I don’t know anyone – except professional footballers – who think professional footballers deserve the money they get paid. The status that the premiership players are given for what they do is out of proportion. David Cameron recently read out a letter of support from the England Football team to the soldiers in Afghanistan – what juxtaposition! Compare a bunch of millionaires who have earned their money by kicking a piece of leather around a park against a group of people who are risking their lives on a daily basis and who earn a pittance in comparison.
What about the clubs, do they fare any better? Well no. It’s them that support the levels of wages the players earn. There’s been a lot of press this season about the levels of debt the clubs have. It seems in some cases that the club owners are using the clubs as personal sources of income and the fact that they are meant to also play football seems like a sideline. Money and business has become more important than the actual game in some cases. The price of attending games seems to be escalating and for structure of pricing for season tickets seems to me to be questionable. It all seems geared towards the business end of the game at the expense of the ordinary fan. Where the grass roots game gives to fans it seems to me that the top flight simply takes and takes from those who can often ill afford it. Higher still the FA and FIFA have various allegations of corruption against them and would also seem to be blinded by the dollar signs being waved in front of them.

So in conclusion, football at its grassroots level is a source of inspiration and strength for people, it can be used as an agent for change and it deserves its title of ‘the Beautiful Game’. But when money and power become involved it becomes corruptible and can lose its way. It can lose sight of what it’s meant to be about and hurt those it’s meant to help.

I fibbed. That wasn't quite the conclusion.

Football is often slammed by the religious communities for being a semi-religion; well I say, 'Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.' read my conclusion again and see if you don't think it could apply to organised religion too.

So in conclusion, football at its grassroots level is a source of inspiration and strength for people, it can be used as an agent for change and it deserves its title of ‘the Beautiful Game’. But when money and power become involved it becomes corruptible and can lose its way. It can lose sight of what it’s meant to be about and hurt those it’s meant to help.

Groundhog day: God & Time.

2010-05-09T19:29:00.002+01:00

Groundhog Day: God & Time from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

2010 promises to be kind of a good year. I have 2 anniversaries to celebrate. In September Helen & I have our 10^th wedding anniversary and we have a few days holiday booked where we’re going to spoil ourselves and spend far too much money. But scary as it sounds being married to Helen for that long it’s the other anniversary that I find more daunting. In June this year it will be 20 years since I left school. That sounds like an awfully long time ago. I’ve written before about how I didn’t really get on that well at school and how much I disliked it, and we’ve said before at cafe sundae that it isn’t the end of the world if you fail exams as there are always other options, but school still remains a massively important part of life; it’s a formative time and your record and memory of school will follow you down the years. Fifteen years ago I remember being surprised at it being so long since I left school and it’s a feeling which still hasn’t gone away. I think that a part of it is that there’s a definite demarcation of time as you progress through the education system - year six, year seven, year eight and so on – but once you’re out of education that firm separation disappears and so one year can very easily blend into the next. Where progress through life was simply a question of being a year older and moving into the next class once these boundaries have been moved progress has to be earned by effort not default. If we’re not careful we can watch the years slip by expecting life to come to us until – to quote Pink Floyd – ‘one day you find ten years have got behind you, no-one told you when to run; you missed the starting gun.’

In this way time can get away from us, but we can’t get away from time. It ticks and it tocks, it ebbs slowly by, it slips through our fingers like sand as we try to hold it. It’s relentless and quiet and constant and going and invisible and irreversible and absolute and awesome and merciless. It rules the universe more than any other thing. The speed of light may be the universal constant, but it’s measured in time. Physicists may claim that time bends and distorts at the edges of the universe, but everything within it is subject to the ravages of time; everything ages, even the universe itself will end. Time is the canvas onto which the universe is painted.

If you decide to have a read of the bible and open it at page 1 – which I don’t recommend - you will see the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In the beginning. The first thing God had to do to be able to create the universe was create time, a medium in which the universe could work. Except that the language I’ve just used is wrong – we can’t say ‘the first thing God did was create time’ because that denotes a chronological order and we can’t have a chronological order without time, so before time was created (which we also can’t say) there was only God except we can’t really say that either as ‘was’ is the past participle of the verb ‘to be’ and denotes a time past, which we can’t have if we have no time. The most we can say is “Outside time, God.” And leave the beginning of genesis as it is with time already called into being. And this makes a nonsense of those idiots who say, “If God created man, who created God?” because they’re stuck in the idea that everything has a beginning and an end and everything being subject to time which if God was around before time – oops I mean outside time – he obviously isn’t subject to its course and can very easily have no beginning and end.

Time has provided a muse for many people to produce work on, the previously quoted Pink Floyd being just one. Cher sang (and I use the word in the loosest possible sense), “If I could turn back time...I’d take back the words that hurt you and you’d stay.” Jim Croce sang, “If I could save time in a bottle The first thing that I'd like to do Is to save every day Till Eternity passes away Just to spend them with you” Time travel has been a staple of science fiction writing in particular. Films like Groundhog Day, sliding Doors and Donnie Darko all use an abnormal passing of time as a central prop for the films plot to revolve around. Shakespeare said, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

A fairly common theme to lots of these ideas is the desire to ‘turn back time’ and get a second chance to do something which has gone wrong. We all have things that we’d do differently if we got chance, but we know that we never can, time cannot be undone. Once something is done or words are said then the moment has passed and it can’t be re-claimed and re-done. Decisions we make or actions we take can have repercussions into the future and bad decisions particularly seem to come back and bite us in the bum. I can see times in my life where I’ve had to make a choice and those choices have lead me to where I am now, had I made a different choice I would be somewhere totally different, I don’t know where but not Manchester, doing something completely different for a living. The choices I’ve made at a point in time have had repercussions not just for me but for other people as well. Time being linear I can’t go back and see how my life would have been different if I’d made a different choice. All we can do is live with the choices we make and aspire to make good choices when the time comes. The journalist Sidney J Harris said “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

So what can we conclude from all this? That we only get one shot at life, that we need to take opportunities as they are presented to us, that we need to decide what we want out of life and drive towards it. Do we want to be remembered after we die? Then we need to start making that happen now. There are few people out of the billions who have lived whose names we know. Beethoven, Einstein, Aristotle, Hitler & St Paul are names that live on long after they died. We can’t all hope to make such a big impression, but we can, if we so desire, aim to influence those around us. I still remember the names of teachers and youth leaders I knew who I thought were inspirational, each of us can make a mark - if we want to. Do we want to devote our life to making such a difference or do we want to devote it simply to pleasure?

Let’s quote some clichés here; why? Because they contain truth.

Carpe diem – seize the day;

A stich in time saves nine.

live each day as if it were your last.

You will never find time for anything, if you want time you must make it.

Time & Tide wait for no man.

I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’ll leave you in peace.

Broke: God & Poverty

2010-04-11T19:30:00.003+01:00

Broke: God & Poverty from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

So Jesus is hanging out with the disciples when a woman comes in and gives Jesus a very expensive gift. It’s kind of the equivalent of a huge bunch of flowers in that it’s not a practical gift and it won’t last long at all – it’s a token of affection rather than something he could use. The disciples go nuts and say to her, “That money could have gone to the poor and been used much better than spending it on silly gestures like this!” Rather than agreeing with them and joining in telling the woman off Jesus tells the disciples to calm down. “There will always be poor people,” says Jesus, “The poor will always be with us.”

So is that statement a kind of laissez faire writing off of those in need? Does Jesus validate doing nothing to alleviate poverty? If so what do organisations like Christian Aid and Tradecraft think they are trying to achieve by their attempts to make poverty history?

The first thing to say is that the word ‘poverty’ is quite nice to type. After you’ve done the ‘pov’ bit you can put the little finger of your left hand on the E key and just roll your fingers – there it is.

The second thing to think about it where poverty comes from.

A long time ago – just after people had decided to stop being hunter gatherers – people realised that they couldn’t supply everything they needed for themselves and so they would have to make swaps with other families to supply those bits of stuff they needed to survive. So Mr Bloggs the butcher would need to go to Mr Briggs the baker to get some bread for his sandwiches. This worked very well as Mr Briggs needed meat for his sarnies so they swapped agreed amounts of bread & meat and all families were happy. Or they were until it got dark and they needed to go and see Mr Evans the candlestick maker. They needed his candles so they could see around their caves, but he was a gluten intolerant vegetarian so he wouldn’t swap anything and so the Briggs’s and Bloggs’s stubbed their toes on the cave walls and ended up having to ask Mr Clark the leather worker if he could invent shoes in return for some cow hides and a birthday cake for his mother-in-law.

This uneven system of trade carried on until Mr Morris the miner discovered some particularly nice shiny pebbles that everyone wanted. They decorated their houses with them, turned them into brooches and earrings and some clever people even discovered that shiny pebbles conduct electricity and invented the internet. Even if people had no use for shiny pebbles themselves they used to keep them as they could swap them for things they needed much easier than their own goods. Their use as currency spread and more and more people collected them. Those that had a lot continued to wear them as ornaments while those who only had a few stashed them under the mattress to use to buy things with and as this behaviour continued the gap between the stashers and the wearers widened. They began to call each other names like ‘social climber’ and ‘oik’ until they no longer wanted to live next to each other and the wearers – being able to afford to do so - moved off in search of bigger caves. The wearers compared their finery to that of their new neighbours and wanted bigger and blingier so devised new ways of getting richer, while the stashers, becoming increasingly desperate for shiny pebbles, became a highly exploitable work force for the wearers and they continued to use their shiny pebbles exclusively as currency and crave a cave posh enough to have an outdoor toilet. And thus capitalism and the class system were borne.

So we can see from this that you need 2 things to create poverty. Firstly you need a lot of money - I’ll say that again – you need a lot of money to create poverty. You need an excess of money in the system for people to be able to hoard it. And secondly you need greed, greed enough for people to crave cash, to collect money and want more and more and more of it. If you want to you can add a third ingredient – ignorance. You could argue that the rich people are often ignorant of the effects their hoarding wealth has on the poor, but I’ll leave that one to you.

So as far as Jesus goes there are 2 issues to poverty, there’s the greed and there’s the whole ‘love your neighbour’ thing. The greed thing’s fairly easy to deal with – There’s nothing wrong with providing enough shiny pebbles to feed and clothe your dependents. There’s nothing wrong with saving for a rainy day, but when the amassing of shiny pebbles becomes an end in itself we need to start to ask questions. And when we don’t care where we get our pebbles from and how we get them then we’re really in trouble. We then start to impact on the whole ‘love your neighbour thing’. Jesus was really clear about this one. It’s not optional, in fact it’s the second most important thing we have to do. Love your neighbour like you love yourself. No matter how badly done to you may think you are on a global scale none of us are poor, we’re not stashers, we’re wearers. So imagine yourself craving that new pair of trainers or mp3 player or diamond encrusted underpants and think about who made them. Were they made in the developing world? That’s where the cheap labour is, that’s where we don’t see the exploitation. Now ‘love your neighbour’. Imagine that it is one of your nearest and dearest that is working in that factory or sweatshop in such appalling conditions – working 14 hour shifts with no breaks and earning only just enough to cover the rent on a shoebox in a gutter. Would you still buy it or would you spend a bit extra to ensure your loved one got decent working conditions and a living wage? Our reaction to the suffering and injustice suffered by the poor should be the same as it would be if we saw our nearest and dearest in their place.

So Jesus cares about poverty. He cares that people are exploited and viewed as tools to get a job done rather than valuable human beings. He cares that people put possessions and themselves above the welfare of others. He cares that people become so blinded by what they have they forget who they are. When he tells the disciples ‘The poor will always be with you,” he means, “You will always need to support them. You will always need to love your neighbour. You will always need to defend those who can’t defend themselves.’ This is the work done by the aid agencies. This is the work that God has for his Church, this is the work he has for you and me.

black Gold: God & Oil

2010-03-14T19:30:00.001Z

Black Gold: God & Oil from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

I don’t want to write a blog this month; it’s too hard.

When we were researching an earlier café sundae topic we chanced upon some material about oil and decided it was a topic worth looking at so we put it in the diary. Then as we’ve been preparing for this café sundae we’ve realised the problem. With many topics we’ve tackled we’ve struggled to find enough material that we can use, but this month it’s been the opposite problem. The scale of the mountain we were asking to climb was above and beyond anything we’ve tackled before and it became apparent that we would have to be less ambitious in our aims if we were to do any justice to what we looked at. All we could hope to do was a quick ramble around the foothills, and leave the summit to another day.

I guess the problem stems from just how important oil is to the modern western way of life. Oil and its derivatives have been used for thousands of years, but it’s only in the last couple of hundred years that the industry has really taken off. Petrochemicals now get used to manufacture a massive range of products we use every day – from plastics and cosmetics to fertilizers and medicines, It provides the fuel that brings the world to our feet and take our feet into the world, it’s even in our bank accounts – Most banks invest heavily in the petrochemical industry as it’s a pretty safe bet to yield good returns. It’s become a massively important part of the world economy and also as important to us individually too.

Over the last decade the price of petrol hasn’t been too far from the top of the newssheets or indeed far from people’s conversations. The oil companies year after year make record profits and yet the price of petrol keeps going upwards – people sense an injustice and it has lead to popular protest. Oil has become so important to people that they expect private companies to virtually give it away, to give us petrol on the same kind of terms as we get our water. But why should they? Oil companies are private businesses and when they were founded they were allowed to sell their product as any other company could – it’s only because they have been so successful in their business and their product has become so important that we expect them to act differently for our benefit.

Far be it for me to defend the oil companies though. The magnitude of the issue we have tried to look at seems to be due to the oil companies knowing their power and importance and acting as if they are above the law. I can’t do justice to the issues in this short space, but let me outline a couple of areas for you: and I’m not going to name companies individually – partly as they all seem to be as bad as each other and partly because if you care about these issues and you want to know more details you can do your own research easily enough.

The first place that oil companies fail is with regard to the environment. Oil is dirty stuff and we’ve all seen the effects of oil tanker spills. We’ve seen news footage of the miles of devastated coastline, black tide ebbing and glooping on black beaches, birds and other wildlife unable to escape the clutches of a black slow death. We have to accept that some accidents will happen. But there are allegations that oil companies could do more to prevent such occurances and frustration at the slowness of their response in the clean up when spillages occur. But there is worse pollution. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that oil companies aren’t taking interest in the environmental impact of their drilling operations in more hidden corners of the world. Across Europe and America companies have to monitor any levels of toxins they produce and control their emissions. Across Africa and vast areas of Asia the oil companies don’t do this and their product produces many toxins which are allowed to pollute the local environments. Poisonous gasses are allowed to escape, oil allowed to pollute water supplies and the oil workers aren’t supplied with the basic safety gear that their western counterparts are required to wear. All this cuts the price of production, but at what cost?

Unfortunately the problem goes still further. Oil companies have been accused of suppressing opposition where it occurs. In the early 90s the people of the Niger Delta began a peaceful protest against the oil company working in the region. They wanted environmental and economic justice and basic human rights. Ken Saro-wiwa was one of their main spokespeople as well as being an author and television producer. In 1995 he was arrested and hurriedly tried and hanged along with 8 other leaders in the protest movement. The trials are widely regarded as having been rigged and the oil company working in the area has been heavily implicated in the events. They were sued by the families of the deceased and settled out of court to the tune of $15.5 million before any evidence could be heard.

This isn’t an isolated incident of corruption; let’s not forget the last American president. Mr George W and most of the top brass in his administration had come from the oil industry where they had held a number of top jobs. W’s first election win was extremely dubious and is hopefully as close as it is possible to get to election rigging in the world’s only superpower, and then they conspired to manufacture the war in Iraq under the pretence of pro-democracy and WMDs but which most people consider to be about oil.

So you see why I don’t want to write a blog this month – where do you start with that lot and what can you say about making things right? It’s difficult finding a positive as we have to use oil and there is no ethical oil company and therefore seemingly little we as consumers can do with our ethical pounds. All I can really suggest is that the oil companies don’t want these facts becoming common knowledge as it reflects very badly on them, so let’s spread the word and shame the companies into doing the right thing. Like the Old Testament prophets we can shout these stories from the rooftops and shine a spotlight into the shady areas of the world where these actions currently go on unseen.

Grrrr: God & Revenge

2010-02-14T19:34:00.001Z

Grrr: God & Revenge from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

It was a cold dark night and it was raining hard. I found myself lost on the moors of Scotland. I spotted lights on the hill top and I made for them. After a hard walk I came upon a tavern and I entered. I shook the rain from my coat and went to warm my hands by the open fire. I glanced over to a table in the corner and there sat on old man with a look of worldly wisdom about him. I went to the bar to ask the Landlord for lodgings for the night and then I went to my room to change into dry clothes. When I was refreshed I descended the stairs and went back to the bar for a drink. “Is everything to your liking, Sir?” asked the barman. “Yes thanks.” I replied, “It’s a lovely room.” “You just wait until tomorrow morning, Sir. If the weather’s right it catches the sunrise beautifully.” “I hope to be asleep when the sun rises.” I quipped. I turned to find an empty table and as I did so a man stuck out his foot and sent me sprawling to the floor spilling my pint all down my dry clothes. I must admit that I took exception to the man and I told him so. I left him in no doubt that I would get even then I went to go back to my room to get changed again, but the old man in the corner stopped me as I passed and bade me sit. “Beware.” he said. “You tread a dangerous path.” I sneered, presuming he was talking about the object of my previous rage, but he looked me in the eye and said, “Beware the black rabbit of revenge, Son. Beware the black rabbit of revenge.” Thinking the old man was mad I stood to leave, but he grabbed my jacket sleeve. The look in his eye pleaded with me to stay and so I retook my seat and listened to what he had to say.

A low breeze blew around our ankles as the man spoke and his eyes darted left and right as if trying to find what caused it. His tones became more hushed and more urgent, “I beg you not to seek out the Black Rabbit of Revenge, your life will be forfeit. I was not always a shrivelled up old man sat in a corner, I hope that by telling you my story I can somehow redeem myself.

No doubt you will have heard the stories of the Black Dogs who prowl around the old moors of this country preying on those unfortunate enough to get lost by luring them over the edges of cliffs? Well there is a more unspeakable horror at lose in these parts, and that is the Black Rabbit of Revenge. He stalks those who feel the need for retaliation and makes their lives a living Hell, consuming their waking moments and their dreams until nothing is left but a bitter shell of impotent rage and a migraine. You look at me as though I’m mad Son, but I know of what I speak. I have seen him, I have met the Black Rabbit of Revenge and I was almost broken by him. I know how he works and how he’s beaten.” He drew deeply on his pint before he continued. “You will meet the Black Rabbit of Revenge as you contemplate your damp clothes. You’ll see a movement out of the corner of your eye and you’ll turn to see what it was and find yourself looking at the man who tripped you. The Rabbit won’t let you forget him. And when you leave the room and are no longer in his company the Rabbit will follow you. Every so often at the most unexpected moment you’ll feel a pull at your trouser leg, and you will look down to find the Black Rabbit of Revenge nibbling at your socks and you’ll think of that man. You’ll awake in the middle of the night to hear the Black Rabbit of Revenge running full pelt around your house and you’ll remember your stained shirt. You’ll find where he’s gnawed your furniture and you will know that he similarly gnaws at your soul. And should be foolish enough to listen to him and seek your revenge then he breaks his promise to leave you be, and he becomes your permanent companion. He sleeps on your pillow, eats from your plate, walks in your shadow and tunnels into every pore of your being. You can try to justify your actions and you can pretend that he’s gone, but you’ll know that the rabbit has burrowed into you and made his home. He dozes, eyes half shut, warm and safe inside your mind. Every time he stretches out his legs or yawns you feel him. You know that while you sleep he digs deeper into your soul whilst at the same time he pulls at the heels of your victim in the hope that he too may hear the call of the Black Rabbit of Revenge thus spreading this horror further and sewing seeds of chaos into the fabric of the universe.”

By this time it was obvious that the old man was deeply scarred and deathly serious. His grave note had got me worried. I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, “So how can I beat the Black Rabbit of Revenge before he gets a hold of me?” The old man nodded sagely. “The Black Rabbit is like any other rabbit. Now think, Lad. What don’t rabbits like?” I did my best to stretch my mind back to the rabbit wrangling GCSE that I’d done at school, but it was so long ago. Then something came to me, “Stamping! Rabbits don’t like stamping!” The old man smiled, “That they don’t,” he said. “Stamping is a danger signal but it doesn’t last long. Put on the Boots of Dormancy when the Rabbit shows his face and stamp hard. He’ll know you simply won’t take action soon and he’ll leave you for a short while. He will be back quickly though to remind you of how you have been wronged and he won’t let up until you either take your vengeance or take stronger action against him. Think hard. What could that action be?” I thought back to my school days and all the time I’d spent ignoring lessons; I’d never have thought then that my life would depend on such an unlikely subject as rabbit wrangling. I stood on metaphorical tiptoes to reach as far back in my memory as I could, and I found something. “Rabbits hate being squirted in the face with a water pistol.” I said. “Good,” said the old man. “That’s right. It’s a way of training them and correcting their behaviour. Use the Water Pistol of Forgetting against the Black Rabbit of Revenge and he’ll learn to leave you alone. Then you can begin to forget your vendetta against this man. But be warned, it isn’t a permanent solution. The rabbit can wait forever for your guard to be down and then he will come and remind you and the cycle will begin again.”

“There must be a permanent solution,” I said. “Or am I cursed till the end of time?”

“There is an answer,” the man said. “Think hard. What do rabbits fear above all else?”

“The eagle!” I had remembered!

“That’s right,” said the Old Man, “Rabbits fear the eagle most of all. An eagle can mean the end of a rabbit. And so you must pray hard that the Eagle of Forgiveness will come and catch your Black Rabbit of Revenge. It will catch and eat him and the rabbit will trouble you no more. Your curse will be lifted.”

I gave a sigh of relief and stood up once more to leave. The Old Man spoke again and prevented my exit, “But be warned. As hard as this knowledge is to attain it is even harder to put into practice. You must pray for the Eagle of forgiveness, but even if he comes he may not catch the Black Rabbit of revenge first time. It may take years, but it is the only solution. Now go and think of all we’ve discussed. I have told you the truth, now is your choice to make.”

I turned and walked out of the now empty bar and went to my room. As I unlocked the door I saw the glow of dawn lighting my room. We had talked all night. The barman was right, the room caught the sunrise beautifully.

No Room at the Inn: God & the Refugee

2009-12-13T19:45:00.003Z

Between 1999 and 2002 the sight of Kosovan Albanians was not unusual in Timperley, Cheshire. A group of 62 of them lived at Meadow Court, on the outskirts of the village, which had become an emergency refugee centre. The Minister of the local Methodist Church, Rev Bruce Thompson, had pressed Trafford Council to use the facility and became heavily involved in looking after the refugees for the duration of their stay there. Café Sundae sent their intrepid reporter Rob to talk with Bruce and find our more about his experiences.

A cold wet Manchester evening forms as I prepare to interview Bruce. As the distance between Manchester and Taunton (where Bruce is currently based) is too great for our respective diaries to negotiate we meet in 2 places – in my imagination and in my memory of previous meetings with Bruce. We therefore talk via e-mail. I turn my imaginary tape recorder on and the interview begins.

The Balkans have a history of being a tinder box for the start of conflicts. Most famously the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot by a Serb nationalist in Sarajevo thus sparking the beginning of the First World War. After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia – a country created in the wake of that great conflict – broke up and the old nationalist tensions began to arise again. The nineties saw 2 Balkan wars – in Croatia and Bosnia –NATO grew tired of the unrest in the area and sent armed forces to intervene. Then in Kosovo the Serb minority took up arms and waged a bitter and ugly war against the Albanian Kosovar population. Much has been written about the conflict and the allegations of genocide and resulting war crimes trials, and it’s against this background that Rev Bruce Thompson saw a need that he and Timperley Methodist Church could meet.

One of the first things you notice about Bruce as he talks is his quiet enthusiasm. As he explains all that happened there’s an intelligent passion that comes through and leaves you in no doubt about the depth of his convictions and the energy he has at his disposal to complete tasks such as bringing a group of refugees to safety in Timperley. “Oh it was an enormous task,” says Bruce, “We were never without things to do. It took over our lives.” Which begs the question ‘So why get involved in the first place?’ Bruce explains how he had seen the news reports of the NATO airstrikes and heard the stories of thousands of Kosovans massacred. “Someone wrote in a newspaper that ‘our moral imagination had been fuelled by memories of the holocaust.’ The sight of a million people from the poorest region of Europe being forced from their homes, crossing mountains in deep snow, with few possessions and provisions, often separated from the male members of their families meant that we had to do something.

Our 1999 Easter Sunday Service of Holy Communion triggered my own involvement. My congregation and I shared an act of solidarity with the Kosovars fleeing persecution in which the bread and wine of communion were left untouched on the table and we broke off imaginary bread and drank imaginary wine. This was an overwhelming act. Shortly after that we were asked to participate in collecting supplies to be taken to Kosovo by a convoy of lorries. The convoy left Manchester and I felt compelled to watch it leave. I placed my hand on a lorry and prayed and I realised that a convoy like that has no room for passengers; maybe God had something for me and the community I serve to undertake.” Bruce explained to me the complicated processes involved in opening up Meadow Court as a refugee centre, and the ways he worked with Trafford Council and the Altrincham Muslim Association. I am amazed even by the amount of work that needed to be done before a single refugee has even arrived. “Timperley Methodist Church should be very proud of what was achieved by her members during that time,” says Bruce, “The experience not only changed the lives of the Kosovans but also the lives of the helpers. Without the support of the Church it couldn’t have happened.”

This seemed a good point to change tack, so I asked Bruce about the Kosovans. Bruce closed his eyes and took a deep breath before he began to answer. “The Kosovans that came to Timperley were the forth flight to come to the UK,” he says, “Most were physically hurt and in need of serious medical treatment. One young woman who came to us had only been married for 6 months, she developed leukaemia and died within 4 months. One man was paralysed from the waist down, underwent a huge number of operations and died just 2 years ago after struggling here for 8 years. One family of five children – 2 brothers, 2 sisters and one cousin – survived a major massacre that claimed almost the rest of their entire family. These teenagers all had severe gunshot wounds and underwent major surgery over many years. Some were completely broken – physically and mentally. Most were terrified and deeply worried for their families left behind or missing. Even now, 10 years on, the wounds still hurt for many of the Kosovans. It takes a lifetime to deal with some issues.” Bruce continued with a heart wrenching account of how most of the refugees had left their homes with nothing, often at gunpoint, and how they had had to be supplied with the most basic things when they arrived in Timperley, “People were very generous to begin with,” continues Bruce, “The manager of a local bed store ordered his staff to strip the display beds and pack as much as possible into the back of one of our volunteers cars. And the owner of a large toiletry company filled the boot and back seat of his car with soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo etc from the staff shop.”

“Was there any opposition?” I asked Bruce. He replies that there was none while the war was underway, “The images on the TV news highlighted their plight and almost everyone was moved by them. However once the war was over and as time moved on the Kosovans had to endure comments such as, ‘Why are you still here?’ or ‘I thought the war was over’ and so forth. The public’s reaction wasn’t helped by the right wing press, not least the Daily Mail with talk about ‘bogus asylum seekers’. There is no such thing as a ‘bogus’ asylum seeker. If you’re seeking asylum then that is a fact. 2 of our helpers received BNP literature through their letterbox denouncing our work. To the best of my knowledge the material wasn’t received by anyone else in their street.”
The next question seemed an obvious one – “How did you deal with the opposition?” Bruce’s face develops a look of determination. “We pressed on regardless.” He says. “We tried as best as we could to ignore the ill-informed comments fostered by those with a different agenda and we tried as best we could to promote the frustrations of the Kosovans at not being allowed to work and also the wonderful contribution of the children to local schools. Over the time the centre was open I learned never to back down when challenging an injustice, it can be done with grace and courtesy but there can come a point when you have to steel your nerves and actually fight for what is right, true and just. When I originally saw the media images of the war I was moved, but I was also deeply concerned about the limited response of the Christian Church to the plight of the Jews and others in the holocaust, yet here was a genocide before our very eyes less than 2 hours flight from Manchester.” I pause to take in the words, but Bruce – it seems – is just getting warmed up, “Jesus invites us to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless etc. and to be able to stand alongside others, whatever their faith, culture or standing in society is an incredible privilege – we all have so much to learn from one another. As we’re coming up to Christmas we should remember that Jesus was born a refugee, so we can say that God is present in the stranger. You will recall that shortly after his birth the gospel according to Matthew has Jesus and his family fleeing the wrath and forces of Herod and taking up residence in a foreign country. On one occasion in the Old Testament – the Hebrew Scriptures – we are directed to love our neighbours. On no fewer than 24 occasions we are directed to welcome the stranger. Anyone who votes BNP is clearly not fulfilling the Christian obligation to welcome those from another country or culture; nor are they celebrating the rich diversity of humankind granted us by our Creator. As a Christian I rejoice in what I might discern in those who bring a different experience and perspective to my life, community and nation. We are all the better for such input.”

It’s obvious to me by the way Bruce talks that he speaks of a time that is very dear to his heart and I wonder what he hoped to gain from bringing the Kosovans to Timperley. “Nothing,” Says Bruce emphatically, then he adds, “But we got more than we ever could imagine.” My curiosity is pricked however, “Bruce,” I say, “You’re a Methodist Minister bringing a group of Muslims into the community of the Church – Surely you hoped to evangelise”. Bruce shakes his head, “The thought of converting the Kosovan Albanians to Christianity was never in my mind. It would have been an abuse of my position to manipulate or coerce people who were in a most vulnerable state. One local minister went in with that view and got absolutely nowhere. The Good Samaritan didn’t help the guy in the gutter in order to get anything out of him – he did it because the guy was in need!”

Bruce still evidently has a lot to say, but our time draws to a close. As we bid each other good-bye he reflects. “You know, I learned a lot through all that happened with the Kosovans.“ I am suddenly glad that I’ve forgotten to turn my tape recorder off, “I learned that as good as we may be at raising money to be sent off to worthy causes it can be too much to ask to care for those on our doorsteps. When we pray for an end to oppression and racial tension we presume the transformation of our world will happen somewhere else.” I add that I agree and that often when we pray God’s answer is, “I could do that, but so could you. So why don’t you tackle this one?” to which Bruce adds, “And we must trust that we’ll be sustained, even when there’s no happy ending (which there can’t be every time) because God will still reveal something of such value that it will always be of benefit, if not at the time then at some point later. I learned to ask for the help of others,” Bruce goes on. “If they decline then it’s their loss but at least they were asked and there’s nothing lost on the part of the one making the request. And I now know that the Christian Church does not have a monopoly on love, and nor does it have a monopoly on truth.”

As we part I congratulate Bruce on his part in this story, his humility seems almost dismissive, “I said at the time that if I never did anything again then at least I did this, for which I thank God, because without him I could never have kept going.”

I am inspired by the story I’ve heard and I drive home in silent contemplation. “…At least I did this…” I think, ‘how many of us have done nearly that much?’

Here is a man who made a difference, a man who almost certainly saved lives. I get the impression that despite the hardships and exhaustion he faced, if he saw a similar situation arise he’d be hard pressed not to do it all again.

Bruce’s book – Shelter From the Storm – is published by Epworth Press( ISBN 07162 0569 6) and is available through all good online bookstores.

Ship Ahoy! God & Somalia

2009-11-08T19:35:00.000Z

It’s happened again.

Allow me to be a little self-congratulatory for a moment. Once again Café Sundae planned months ago to take a look at a topic which is hot news at the moment. I don’t know how we do it!

You should have seen in the news lately quite a lot about Somalia and the amount of piracy there is around Somali waters, and in particular at the moment the kidnap of Paul and Rachel Chandler from Tunbridge Wells. There is much concern amongst the international community about the pirates and the ease at which they operate from their Somali bases and a growing fleet of navy ships representing many countries patrol the waters near Somalia in an effort to make the waters safe for commerce – which until the Chandlers were taken was the main target for the pirates. But is this the best solution to the problem or are we just treating the symptoms of a disease that will continue to spread?

Somalia is a young country, but a very old civilisation. Cave paintings have been found there that date back to around 9000BC. Situated where it is it was on a major trade route between Africa and the Middle East it enjoyed the wealth of cultural exchange as well as the financial benefits. Fast forward to the Europe’s 19^th century land grab of Africa and the people of the area successfully repelled attempts by Italy, France and Britain to colonise the area. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 heightens the importance of the straights of Aden as a trade route and brings about increased efforts by the Europeans to extend their spheres of influence on the Horn of Africa. The Dervish leader Mohammed Abdullah Hassan united the Somali people to retain their independence.

In 1920 Britain used aeroplanes against the Dervishes for the first time and Southern Somalia came under British influence. About the same time the North-East of the region came under Italian influence. British and Italian forces then clashed – particularly during the Second World War – to gain sole control of what was known as Somaliland. Independence came and Somalia was founded in 1960 when the British and Italian Governments both withdrew and allowed Somalia to become a united country. As often happened when a European country left a colony, there was a power vacuum and much squabbling amongst the various tribes living in Somalia and in 1991 the Government fell. Since then Somalia has been essentially governmentless – a situation which has led to the current state of near anarchy and the pirates being able to operate as blatantly as they do.

So what you have in Somalia is a fiercely independent country that was once an affluent and important society compared with its neighbours that has been brought to its knees in a very short space of time by European meddling. And to rub salt into the wounds a huge proportion of the world’s wealth gets paraded in front of its eyes as the huge container ships of the west sail through the Straights of Aden. The Somali people live in abject poverty and have to watch our luxury goods float past their nose ends as they journey to and from our markets. Put things in these terms and you can maybe begin to understand the actions of the pirates – their being willing to take on such a dangerous profession. Life on land is no better as the lack of Government means that for the last 20 years Somalia has been in a state of civil war as the various tribes struggle for power. Often the pirates are seen as heroes by the Somali people for defending Somalia’s right to make a living and boosting Somalia’s economy.

But we miss an important part of the picture here. Small groups of uneducated Africans, such as the pirates are, surely lack the resources to hold supertankers to ransom and extract payment for the return of the ships from their rightful owners. There has to be more people involved. Enter stage left - organised crime.

As I’ve already said Somalia is a lawless land, and into this disordered country came a criminal class to take the power which the politicians were unable to share and use it to exploit the people who were already broken and hope-less. When the pirates take a ship it is to these people they bring it, and they who gain from it. The pirates get paid some for their efforts, but it is organised crime that is the big winner. Exactly who is involved in this side of pirating is unknown. For obvious reasons they keep their identities very secret. Whether they’re from Somalia or the international community – or a mixture of both – is unclear, but while the fighting inside Somalia continues they are being allowed to operate uninhibited, making themselves richer and richer and risking the lives of ordinary Somalis.

I’ve painted a picture in very broad brushstrokes here. Hopefully you can see the picture is a more complex one than is often presented on the news. The solution to the issue has to be one that takes all these factors into account – and all the subtleties I’ve missed out. Whether we leave Somalia to sort itself out, or whether we intervene – and how we intervene – is very much up for debate. Whether the ships owners and insurance companies are helping or making matters worse by paying ransoms and whether we consider our history in the area to be part of the problem and the implications of responsibility that would bring are questions that will be asked if things are allowed to continue as they are now. In the short terms we wish for the safe return of the Chandlers and we hold them, their family and their captors in our prayers.

Big Issue: God & Homelessness

2009-10-12T09:10:00.005+01:00

Bitter hostile pavement

Cold cold cold

Forgotten but not forgiven

Anger eroded to apathy

Hated and hurting.

The smell of desperation turning away politer nostrils

Begging, for money, for understanding, for a moment of time.

Hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth.

Cardboard string and scraps - a home fit for a beggar

Desolate, despised, disowned.

Dirt and dustbins, home and help

A fitting feast for a forgotten fellow

Turn away, walk away, cold, cold, cold

Useless and used up. ignored and ignoble.

Spare some change. Change awareness

Change minds change lives,

Change the system. Change the world.

Hopes dashed against the concrete of an open skied prison

The urban fox a more welcome dinner guest.

A crime against society or a crime of society

Deprived of much more than a place to live.

A groundhog day begins with the smell of diesel and upturned rubbish

A dawn chorus of binmen clattering and shouting to awake the dead.

The homeless arise: Dead men walking.

An old carrier bag as a picture of a life

Unwanted and un-noticed it floats past on the breeze

It’s whole reason-to-be somewhere in the past.

The day as long as the desire to live it

Then retreat. To bed or the bottle or the back of the mind.

How to hide from the horror and loneliness?

hand to mouth, hand to mouth.

Scraping by,

Where there’s a will there’s a way.

Scraping a living,

Where there’s a way there’s hope.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel,

Hope against hope in hell.

The foxes have holes, and the birds have nests;

But the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.

Stabby stabby bang bang: God & violence

2009-09-13T19:50:00.001+01:00

My name is James. 5 years ago today I was involved in ‘an incident’ as the police call these things. When I think about it now it seems such a silly thing to happen, but I can’t laugh about it.

I was 19 years old and had a bit of a reputation around my area. I had got into a few fights, but nothing like what people thought. Anyway I was a couple of streets away from home when it happened. This kid was coming at me fists flying and I was totally bewildered why. He was a couple of years younger than me and about 4 inches shorter. He landed a couple of weak punches but he was mainly just irritating, like a mosquito buzzing about. When he swung at me again I avoided his punch easily and floored him – it was really a warning shot that he’d bitten off more than he could chew, but when he got up he went in his pocket and pulled out this little knife. I just looked at him; he had such a look of terror in his eyes, but he wasn’t me he was scared of, it was the knife in his hand. He kind of stared at me through the knife and shuffled nervously. I didn’t really know what to do, I had nothing against the kid, but here he was threatening to stab me. If I’d known how he would have reacted I wouldn’t have got my knife out. I held it out in a way that I hoped showed I wasn’t going to use it, but had it if I needed it and he just lunged at me. He caught me just below the ribs and if I’d thought he looked scared before this was something else. I felt warm and wet and then I fell over.

Have you ever watched a film with your eyes closed and a pillow over your ears? That’s what the next few minutes were like. I heard the muffled sound of him running away, I heard screams and I heard sirens and felt hands on me, but it was all happening to someone else. Then I died.

5 years ago to this very day I died. I was stabbed. I was killed – murdered even – by a kid with a piddley little knife.

Let me just set things straight a second. I am dead. I’m not a ghost, and I still can’t tell you whether there’s an afterlife. But I know that I’m on ‘the other side’. I’ve spent a lot of the last 5 years watching. I’ve spent my time watching the people who were in my life, I’ve had to watch those nearest to me get over my death and try to pick up the pieces - and let me tell you, it hasn’t been pretty.

I’ve watched my Mum fall to pieces. She took my death really hard. I was her eldest son. She was proud of me. I’d not long left college and got a job. I’d not long met a girl and was getting quite serious about her. Mum was proud. Then I got taken away. I will never forget when the police went round to the house to tell Mum & Dad what had happened. Mum made the most awful wailing screaming kind of noise. Dad went white and tried to hug Mum, but she just went wild screaming and punching anything that came within her reach. It took both policemen to restrain her. The doctor came and sedated her; he may as well have administered a lethal dose. 5 years later and she’s a shell of who she was. Her life ended the day mine did. She’s never been back to work, she never goes a day without crying inconsolably and she’s so debilitated and listless. As I watch her I cry. I wish above all else that I were ghost, and then I could appear to her: but I don’t know what I’d tell her, I could tell her that I’m alright, but I don’t know if I am. I could tell her that Heaven is wonderful, but I don’t know if it is. I wish I had supernatural powers so I could take the power out of her valium, but I can’t so I have to sit here helplessly and watch her ebb slowly towards lifelessness.

Dad was torn to pieces too by my death, but he’s dealt with it differently. He mourned, he took care of my kid brother because my Mum couldn’t cope. He spoke to the police, the media and everyone else who came to call, he gave a eulogy at my funeral and broke down crying in the middle of it. Then he went back to work and tried to pretend that nothing had happened. He did what most blokes do; he hid away his feelings, tried to be strong and did his best to take care of his family. Everyone says he’s been amazing. But I’ve seen him when he’s alone. He still occasionally locks himself in the bathroom and turns the shower on to cover the sounds of his crying. He still drinks a little bit more than he used to as well. Sometimes I see him just sitting staring into the middle distance. He has a strange melancholy smile on his face and I know he’s imagining he things we should have done together – trips to the pub or the football, him helping me fix my car, buy my first house and so on. He needs someone to take care of him for a while, but he’ll never let on.

Once upon a time I had a great kid brother. He was called Paul and when I died he was 10 years old. He was a great kid, happy and outgoing and he did what he was told. When I got killed he got really scared and refused to leave the house for weeks. He would scream and fight whenever anyone tried to get him out of the door. Over time his fear turned to anger. Now I have a 15 year old brother that you wouldn’t recognise if you knew him when he was 10. He fights. A lot. He takes my murder out on anyone who crosses his path. And he carries a blade - a big one. I hope and pray that he never uses it, I kind of hope he doesn’t get picked up by the police with it on him as it would land him in some serious trouble; but maybe that’s what he needs. Dad can’t cope with him, Mum doesn’t try. He’s the kid you always avoid at school. I’d do anything to get my kid brother back.

My girlfriend was there when I was killed. She watched me die. She held my hand and mixed her tears with my blood as I lost consciousness. I loved her. She had nightmares in the following days and had to relive the incident over and over again for the police and then had to give evidence at the trial of the kid who killed me. When all that was done she had to pick herself up and get on with her life. She had to re-sit a year of college as she’s missed so much work. She’s beautiful. She’s had a couple of boyfriends since me, but the relationships don’t last long. She has this idealised image of me that she expects them to live up to, and they just can’t do it. I wanted to be the one to make her happy, instead of which I’ve become the one to prevent her from finding happiness. I want her to forget about me. I want her to move on. I want her to find someone to give her everything I can’t but until she leaves me behind she won’t.

But you know who I pray for most of all? The stupid kid who stabbed me, I feel sorry for him. Straight after he stabbed me he just ran home. He was petrified. He hid in his room for a couple of days too numb to do anything, He knew he should turn himself in but he was too scared, so when the police came to arrest him they found him huddled up shaking in his room, his knife still covered in my blood sitting on his desk. One trial later and he’s locked up with some real nasty pieces of work. Forced to room with people his mother would have grounded him just for talking to, but now he’s trapped with them. He used to be a nice kid. What he had against me I still don’t know, but his life was irrevocably altered by that incident. He’s had to learn a whole different set of values to get through his time kept at her majesty’s leisure. He’s learned to fight, to lie to steal. He’s learned to distrust authority and everyone around him. He’s missed out on everything he should have experienced in his young adult life – he can’t drive, he’s never voted, never had a proper girlfriend or a proper job. His Mum & Dad are suffering for his mistake too. They were mortified to think that their Son was even carrying a knife let alone willing to use one. They were in denial for a long time - until he pleaded guilty at his trial. They felt all the times people nudged and whispered in the supermarket as they shopped, saw all the cars slow down and the stares as people drove past their house. They moved but it wasn’t long before the truth caught up with them and they felt the eyes again. The dumb kid’s getting out of prison soon. He’s going to struggle.

A few months before I died I was walking down the road near where I live and this squirrel just ran into the road. It got across the near side, but the road was really busy and I could tell that it was on a collision course with a BMW. It ran straight into the side of the wheel of the moving car: one second bouncing along happily, the next snuffed out, lifeless, a shell, carrion. The image of the squirrel has stayed with me. There’s lots in there about the fragility of life and stuff like that, but what struck me was the stupidity of the animal, it’s obliviousness, the lack of awareness it had to the impending danger. Lately when I’ve thought of that scene the squirrel has the face of the stupid kid who killed me.

Processed: God & Food

2009-07-12T19:19:00.002+01:00

I am many things. Some of the things people have told me I am are unrepeatable. One thing I am not is a clairvoyant, but I’m going to take a stab here at predicting the future.

No doubt you’ll have seen one of those science fiction films or TV programs where the people of the future get handed a little tablet by a machine, and the little tablet is a meal containing all the nutrients the person needs to sustain themselves for the next day? Well here’s my prediction – it’ll never happen. Why?

Food is important. That may seem like an obvious point to make, but it is so true I’ll say it again. Food is important. There’s the massively important role it plays in providing us with fuel, energy, nutrition and all we need to survive, but there’s also the role it plays in society. When we celebrate a family event we often go out for a meal, sharing food together features in probably all the religions of the world, when we find that special someone we cook for them, just about every momentous occurrence gets marked with special food. That’s too important to lose to ‘scientific progress’.

Food is one of those topics that everyone has an opinion on, because everyone eats. Or if they don’t eat they’ll have opinions on why not. So this is what I think. I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist, I don’t try to eat particularly healthily and I’m not a big fan of vegetables. Some of what I say will contradict advice from those more in the know than I am, but this is what I think.

I can guarantee that some of what I say will contradict advice from health professionals because they are constantly contradicting each other, One week we’re told a particular food or food group is very healthy and will prolong our lives, the next we’re told the same foods will lead to health problems and an early grave and we’re told not to eat too much of it. It’s difficult enough – if not impossible - to stick completely to dietary guidelines offered by the medical profession, but factor all the different diet plans and it becomes a real minefield of disagreement and dissention.

The saying ‘You are what you eat’ is true, what we eat has an effect. Chefs know this - the way animals are reared affects the taste and quality of the meat. Next time you’re in the supermarket look at the colour of bog-standard factory-farmed chicken and compare it to a free-range corn-fed variety. They could almost be different birds. Production of Kobe beef, salt marsh lamb, fois gras, veal, wild mushrooms and free range diary products all depend on the food that goes into producing a particular quality in the end product that we in turn consume. In turn we have to consider that whatever we eat will have an effect on our bodies. At it’s simplest, if we eat too much we put on weight, if we eat too little we lose it. But there’s more than that. If we don’t eat a balanced diet we will become deficient in certain vitamins or minerals and health problems will occur. Scurvy, rickets and beriberi are diseases all caused by vitamin deficiencies which were fairly common before we figured out how vitamins worked and could provide nutritional advice on how to avoid them. But even now people suffer ill-health due to their diets. Processed foods contain too high levels of salts, sugars, trans-fatty acids, preservatives, colourings and other additives that damage us and we’re advised to eat them in moderation. We’re given guidelines about how much fruit, veg, meat, alcohol and so forth we should consume. We’re presented with target weights we should aim to be and we’re frowned upon if we stray from the letter of the law laid down before us. 5 –a-day of this, 2 units of that, Omega 3, high fibre, low cholesterol, pre-biotics, pro-biotics, superfoods, anti-oxidants, polyunsaturates, phytonutrients…What do I need to do round here to get a doughnut and a cup of coffee?

Here’s the thing. I enjoy food and I enjoy eating food I like. I don’t eat a bad diet – we don’t buy process ready meals or ready-made sauces in our house because we simply don’t like them and making meals from scratch is easy enough and much tastier – and as far as I know I am fit and healthy (I have asthma, but that’s nothing to do with diet). If I were to attempt to stick to the regimes set by nutritionists and government bodies food would become a chore. The pleasure of eating would diminish under a pile of paperwork as I try to work out how many grams of salt I’ve consumed today and how many more pretzels I can eat without raising my blood pressure. The social aspect of food would be crippled under everyone’s demands concerning what they could and couldn’t eat that day. We would be healthier, but I doubt we’d be happier. In fact I’m not sure we would be healthier. We’d all be suffering from heightened levels of stress caused by having to stick rigidly to a regime that forces us to eat lots of things we don’t necessarily enjoy.

That’s all alright in theory. I’m lucky, I don’t have any food allergies and I have a metabolism and lifestyle that – as far as I’m aware - can cope with the amount I eat, so I’m not noticeably overweight or underweight. But what about those who do need to take a notebook & pencil to the restaurant when they go out? For many, food is a major problem. I have a few friends who have food allergies – nut allergies, diabetes etc. – and it seems such hard work constantly checking what you eat and avoiding potentially life threatening foods. But not only do we have to consider these problems, but there’s a whole set of difficulties caused by eating disorders. I don’t want to get into these because of the seriousness of the conditions and my lack of knowledge, but not to mention them seems to not complete the picture.

It seems somehow odd that something so absolutely fundamental to our lives would be so fraught with difficulties, and yet food still remains for the majority a source of pleasure beyond simply re-fuelling. Like most things in life there’s a balance to be struck. We need food to be healthy and we need food for pleasure, the two don’t necessarily sit side by side. It’s up to each of us individually to strike a balance between the two where we’re happiest. If we can’t find that place we need to start trying to ask ourselves why or else hope scientists prove my lack of clairvoyant ability.

I want that one! God & Envy

2009-06-14T19:45:00.005+01:00

Many thanks to Phil Sayer for supplying the voice-over.

Once upon a time there was a boy called Rob, and his job was to write a blog every month for people to read and enjoy. He quite liked writing his blog as it gave him the opportunity to talk crap for a few minutes in a way that that sounded important and wise. He also got to wear his favourite jumper.

One evening he was sitting in his study writing his blog, it wasn’t going well. It was a hard topic to write about. “What do I know about envy?” he thought as he sulked and sipped his coffee, “The only thing I’m envious of is people who don’t have to write a blog about envy.” As he sat and thought and stared at his computer screen he could hear the television downstairs, “I wish I had time to watch telly.” He thought to himself as he heard Helen’s loud raucous laughter bouncing off the walls. “It’s not fair. If I had a laptop like Helen’s I could sit downstairs and watch telly while I wrote my blog. I want a laptop.”

Just then he heard the unmistakable sound of Helen opening a bottle of wine, “That does it!” thought Rob, “Why should I sit up here working hard while she enjoys herself.” He stomped down the stairs and asked Helen what time tea would be ready in a very demanding tone of voice. “If I can’t watch telly I don’t see why she should,” he thought to himself.

As Helen trudged through to the kitchen to start making tea there was a sour note in the air between them, but Rob didn’t notice, as he was too busy being smug. He went back upstairs, but instead of getting on with writing his blog, he looked on EBay for a laptop for himself.

The next day was a sunny day, so Rob decided to go out on his bike instead of writing his blog. He hadn’t got very far at all before one of his wheels fell off. Rob said a word that would have been “Drat!” if anyone had been listening, but they weren’t so it wasn’t. Then he turned back to push his bike home. On his way he was passed by a man on a brand new shiny bicycle. “Look at that bike. That looks so much fun to ride,” thought Rob. He imagined himself on the bike riding up and down hills with ease, locking it outside the computer shop while he went inside to pick up his new laptop, riding over Helen’s foot when she was enjoying herself too much. Then he imagined himself running up to the man - who was far too far away by now - and pushing him over and stealing the bike. Rob was in a real sulk now, everything he had was rubbish, and everything everyone else had was great. And he still had his stupid blog to write while everyone else played out in the sun.

When he got in the house Helen was busy cleaning the oven, “What’s wrong with you?” she asked as he was obviously unhappy. “It’s not fair,” he said, “everyone else gets to go play out in the sun except me and I have to write my stupid blog on a stupid computer up the stupid stairs.”

“Errm… Everyone gets to play out? What do you think I’m doing? I’m cleaning the oven. Do you think I do this for fun?” said Helen.

“Well that’s your own fault.” Said Rob petulantly, “You shouldn’t have got it dirty cooking tea last night should you.”

The sour note returned, and this time it brought it’s older brother with it.

Rob still couldn’t face sitting upstairs writing his blog, so he went out for a walk. As he went down his street he saw the man on his bike coming the opposite way. “Now’s my opportunity,” thought Rob and he ran up to the man as he cycled past and he shoved him as hard as possible, grabbed the bike and sped off as quickly as he could. He rode it around for a while until he got tired and then he went home. The bike was fun, but so was his old one. He went into the house and saw Helen. She looked like she was in a bad mood, so Rob went upstairs to stay out of the way. He sat in front of his computer and looked busy, so she wouldn’t shout at him if she came upstairs.

Rob fell asleep. Rob had a dream.

In his dream he was playing on a brand new shiny laptop. He went on facebook, he went on MySpace and he went on EBay. Then Rob went on MSN and started a conversation with someone who called himself ‘Elohim’. He told Elohim about how he was struggling to write his blog and all that had transpired because of it. Elohim said that he was puzzled (presuming he was a he!) because although Rob seemed pleased about his new acquisitions he should think about their true cost. This confused Rob and he asked Elohim what he meant. “Well,” typed Elohim. “apart from the obvious theft of the bicycle and the possible repercussions from that, how did you buy this computer you’re dreaming you’re typing on? Credit card? So you couldn’t afford it and now you’ll have to stretch your finances paying it off. You’ve damaged your relationship with Helen with your bad moods and all the time you’ve wasted online looking for new computers and bikes mean you’re still no closer to finishing your blog and it’s Café Sundae tomorrow.”

Rob woke with a start. “Oh ****! My blog!”

And that’s why I haven’t written a blog this month.

Harwood Special - Beautiful Mind: God & Difference

2009-05-17T21:03:00.005+01:00

Cafe Sundae went on the road.

We took Cafe sundae to Harwood Methodist, Bolton and had a great time with the people there. Here is the blog we used for them, so they get a chance to comment. The keener-eyed of you may notice that this an old blog previously posted on our old blog site. Comment away!!

But being that little bit different hasn't always been a positive thing.

I didn't really get on that well at school. The formal education system didn't agree with me and I don't think many teachers knew how to get the best out of me. It didn't help that the subjects that were offered to me to study didn't particularly interest me. I went to school in Harrogate, which everyone tells me is a lovely town. But it is a small town and a conservative town and the range of subjects offered at the schools there didn't extend much beyond maths, English, sciences and languages. One of the other secondary schools in the town offered PE as a GCSE subject and I was amazed when I found that out – although why anyone would want a GCSE in running round a muddy field in the rain whilst being shouted at by a thug with a qualification was beyond me. I didn't stand out at anything at school, I was – and still am - crap at sports and although I am intelligent I was in a class full of people cleverer than me who worked really hard. I just cruised through school doing just enough work to get passes in my subjects in order to keep off the teachers' radars as much as possible. I never really fitted in and I never really found out why.

I did have a good set of friends, although again because I was just that little bit different I stood out just enough to be the butt of people's jokes from time to time. A big bone of contention was my tastes in music. I remember my friends' tastes were always a couple of years behind mine. When I was 12 I discovered heavy metal – the heavier the better. I loved bands like slayer, gravedigger and venom along with iron maiden, motorhead and all the rest. My friends were still listening to pop and chart music and on certain occasions made their feelings on my tastes well known to me! A couple of years later they discovered heavy metal and I lent them lots the music I had collected, but my tastes had moved on and I was listening to Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin & Jimi Hendrix. Although they were happy to borrow albums from me they were also happy to express their disapproval at what I was then listening to. Again a couple of years after that they discovered Pink Floyd and the cycle continued.

It was once I left school that I began to find the things I could do well. I got involved in the local Youth for Christ centre and started playing in bands with other people and discovered that it was something I could do – both the playing bit and the messing around with PA's and recording bit. I even started attending bible studies and I discovered I was good at thinking – something I'd never even contemplated doing throughout my formal education – and fairly soon realised my opinions were valued, sometimes even sought after.

I slowly found my niche as I discovered my strengths. I realised that the things that made me different at school and had caused me difficulties were the things that I now enjoyed and I was good at. My idiosyncrasies are a fundamental part of who I am and what I do. Forward fast to today and these things that set me apart have become skills few people possess which keep me busy – sometimes too busy – providing services for people. I have made a career and a life out of my peculiarities. I'm not under any illusions, there were people at school who thought I was an idiot loser and there are people now that think the same, but I've found that my quirks are in demand; and I'm happy with that!

Now as I look back at my time at school I have the gift of hindsight. Sometimes when I was at school I used to try to fit in more, now I'm glad that I didn't. If I had the opportunity to do it all again would I do it differently? If I were going to be a responsible youth leader I'd say if I did it again I'd work harder and try to get better grades. But in truth I wouldn't. I would hate to have to do it again because I hated it first time round, but I wouldn't do it differently. What I was then – with all its difficulties and awkwardness – has led to who I am now. Had I done things differently, had I compromised who I was in order to fit in more, had I tried to be popular I wouldn't be where I am now, I wouldn't have found these things I do that I enjoy and are in demand and I wouldn't be writing a blog every month for café Sundae.

It wasn't me: God & Blame.

2009-05-10T19:15:00.008+01:00

Well, that’s it. After 2 years of writing this blog the inevitable has happened and I’m powerless to prevent it.

I’ve got writers block.

I’ve sat here and I’ve sat here and I’ve continued to sit here and I can’t think of a single thing to write. And when I’ve done that I’ve sat somewhere else and still nothing comes. I’ve been out for walks, done headstands, eaten fish, eggs, deep fried wichety grubs, and even shredded wheat and still not a single pertinent thought has entered my head. I’ve asked people what they think, read many internet articles and walked past the library several times and I can only conclude that you’re going to have to get on without a blog this month and hope my writers block clears before next month.

Please contain your disappointment. It’s really not my fault. I’ve done everything I can to resolve the situation, but it has occurred. I blame Will. He takes the minutes at our café sundae meetings, so it was him who minuted that we wouldn’t have a café sundae in April. That’s got me out of the routine of writing the blog, and now I can’t seem to get back into it.

Actually. Come to think of it Helen shares some responsibility for my lack of writing as well. Over our month off she’s made me enjoy myself and do fun stuff, which means I haven’t been thinking things through as much as usual and it seems I have difficulty turning my brain back on. And she’s washed my blog jumper.

Speaking of brains I blame Mr Tetley, Mr Theakston, and Mr Guinness. Over the last 20 years I have enjoyed their delicious brews on several occasions. They make them so moreish. But medical science suggests that over-indulgence in these fabulous fermented fluids can lead to destruction of brain cells, so if they had made their products less appetizing I’d still have more of my faculties and I wouldn’t have this writer’s block now.

And while we’re about it, it’s your fault too. All you who come to café sundae or read the blog online – and especially you who comment! You’ve told me how much you enjoy my prattlings and that has lead to pressure being put on me to up the ante every time. The pressure to keep the blogs at a high standard has surely lead to writers block with the fear that at sometime I won’t hit the mark.

So over the next weeks I’m going to try to search for a compensation lawyer that doesn’t make me dry heave too much and sue the pants off everyone who has contributed to my problem. It may seem quite extreme, but I think it’s for the best.

Even though I’m expecting a six-figure settlement I’m not doing it for the money, I’m doing it because I think you all need to realise what you’ve done to me, and if my problem is highlighted it may prevent it happening to someone else. I’ve thought about my course of action long and hard, and I believe it’s the only option open to me. I don’t want to be seen adding to the problems caused by our claims culture, but I have a more genuine case than a lot of those people who sue at the drop of a hat - all those smokers who sue the tobacco companies, or the obese people who sue fast food companies for example. And what about that bloke a couple of years ago who ran over a boy on his bike, then sued him for denting his BMW. People like that seem to be just out for what they can get for themselves ready to blame other people for their mistakes and offload their responsibility onto others regardless of the consequences for whoever they sue. A lot of people who sue don’t realise that they often make the problem worse – for example there has been a rise in the number of people suing their local councils when they’ve tripped on an uneven footpath. Do they not realise that when they receive a settlement it comes out of the council’s purse and then the council has less money to spend on improving the quality of footpaths?

I also think that people do genuinely have difficulty accepting that they have made mistakes. People’s egos don’t allow them to be anything but perfect, so any mistakes must therefore be someone else’s fault. Suing successfully proves they’re right, formalises the process of absolving themselves and keeps their self-image intact. It’s an attractive proposition. I’m positive I don’t fall into this trap as Helen is always pointing out my flaws so I know I’m not perfect.

What needs to happen is for people to take responsibility for their own actions and the consequences they bring about. To stop trying to use litigation to solve what they perceive as their problems. People need to work together in community rather than against each other. They need to stop looking only at number 1, and realise their place in a wider society in which everyone has needs and problems and only a finite amount of resources to go round. We need to work together to solve everyone’s problems, not against each other to sort out only our own.

And so to teach you this important lesson, you’ll be hearing from my solicitors very soon.

Crunchy Credit: God & Greed

2009-03-09T20:28:00.006Z

So I’m sitting here trying to think of a good anecdote to start this blog off and illustrate what we’re thinking about this month, but everything I think about is topped by what’s actually happening in the economy at the moment. Around us everywhere are the visible consequences of greed. Greed in the financial sector has lead to the world economy heading into recession, and whereas you and I didn’t make the decisions we have to live with the consequences. It’s quite plain to see that the consequence of greed is that everyone loses.

Where does greed come from? What makes us greedy? If I may be allowed to propose my own little theory – If you look around the animal kingdom you will see that many predatory animals don’t get 3 square meals a day. They’ll make a kill once a week, once a month sometimes even once every six months and as a consequence they have to gorge themselves on their prey as they don’t know when their next meal will come along. If any rival tries to steal their food they will defend it to the utmost as their possession. I imagine that when we were living the hunter-gatherer existence we lived an opportunistic lifestyle similar to that. A small band of hunters would chance upon a mammoth or some such and the community would feast on it. If a rival tribe came to try to share or steal it they would be repelled as certainly as possible. As society evolved and we became farmers we’ve retained some of those hoarding instincts and they have evolved into greed.

We all exhibit signs of greed to a greater or lesser extent. We all own things we don’t need. It is a natural instinct for all of us to get as far away from poverty as we can, it’s a basic survival instinct to make sure we have ‘enough.’ Most of us won’t get the opportunity to take that to excess, but would we if we had that chance? Would we draw the line and say, “I have enough now; I don’t need to gather more.” According to Wikipedia the world’s richest man is Warren Buffet who has $62 billion. He’s 79 years old. I think he’ll struggle to spend all his money before he dies even if he tries really hard. I think his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would struggle to make a dent before they die. Bill Gates comes in third with $58 billion. These individuals and others are richer than a good number of the World’s poorest nations and yet they feel justified in their wealth. Consider the billions they have and then consider that 40% of the world’s population have to live on less than $2 a day. Even with this scant evidence it would be possible to suggest that these people have got so rich at the expense – directly or indirectly – of other people.

The 1886 US court case Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the human rights and protections afforded to individuals, and thus began the rise of corporate culture where big companies are offered the same protections as people are, but aren’t subject to criminal law. Where companies have grown to be international (helped in no small part by the above case) they can sit above local law and seemingly do as they want. This leads to massive companies and corporations which can make or break governments and buy out poorer countries as they will. This type of greed leaves me even more baffled. I can at some level understand why an individual may amass wealth, but why people would work so hard to make a concept (a company) so hugely wealthy is beyond me. What good it does for this company (which isn’t a person regardless of what the law says) to horde such resources is baffling to me, but again it’s done at the expense of millions of people worldwide.

Can I just say at this point that there’s nothing wrong with being rich. It’s your attitude to what you have which can get you into trouble. Jesus told a story about a man who harvested a huge crop and built bigger barns to store it all in so he could take it easy for a while when all around him his neighbours and people in his community would have been going hungry and struggling to make ends meet. God took a very dim view of that man’s actions. I said in an earlier blog that the popular saying ‘Money is the root of all evil’ is a misquote. St Paul actually wrote ‘Love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.’ He also said that greed is a form of idolatry.

And while we’re mis-quoting other people, Margaret Thatcher used a John Wesley quote to justify some of her economic policies. Wesley said, “Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can,” and she used that to justify people making as much money as they could in the 1980s. But consider that he also said, “When I have money, I get rid of it quickly, lest it find a way into my heart.”

We’re on a roll with the quotes now, have another one. Friedrich Koenig, the inventor of the high speed printing press said,”We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.”

And to end with here’s a Native American proverb.

A Native American grandfather talking to his young grandson tells the boy he has two wolves inside of him struggling with each other. The first is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other wolf is fear, greed and hatred. "Which wolf will win, grandfather?" asks the young boy. "Whichever one you feed," is the reply.”

Porky Pies - God & Honesty

2009-02-09T23:02:00.004Z

Rob was unable to write a blog this month due to work commitments. But in the spirit of all the best newspaper columns a guest writer was found. Step up to the mark Dr. Billiam Sudsworthy and let's hear what you have to say.

So just in case you haven’t worked it out by now, it’s actually Will’s Blog this month. That’s right, I’m stepping into Rob’s shoes this month, and I can honestly say that they are very smelly!

Hmm. I’ve never done a blog before. How would Rob approach this Blog?

He’d probably start by trying to work out why people lie. Let me check on Google. Okay…I see. There seem to be three different views.

The 1st set of experts say that we are bred to lie. It starts with our parents. We soon find out that we are not allowed to say “Grandma, why do you smell of cabbages?” or “Grandad, why do you smell of wee?” It carries on with boyfriends or girlfriends. How do you respond to “Does my bum look big in this?” or “Do you love football more than me?”

The 2nd set of experts say that humans have evolved to be liars. This is the “survival of the fittest” view. They say that honest humans didn’t last long in their caves. They say that humans are just like the rest of nature, and nature tells some incredible lies in order to survive. Just think of the Venus Flytrap. Or big brother. Under this definition, putting on make up or wearing a wig might be considered a lie.

The 3rd set of experts say that we should stop using our upbringing or nature as an excuse for the simple fact that it is our free choice whether to lie or not, and that we lie to make life easier for ourselves. It is the quickest way to avoid embarrassment or get the thing we want.

So if lying is so ingrained in us humans, why did God make “Do not lie” one of the Ten Commandments? Why did Jesus re-state how important this is?

Is it because when you tell a lie, you often end up having to tell yet another lie to cover up the first one? And then another lie to cover up that one. And then another lie to cover up that one, and another, and another, another…and where does it end?

Is it because lying can become a habit that is hard to break out of? The police often find the biggest criminals through spotting the small habitual little lies that they cannot stop themselves from telling.

Is it because the only way that humans can get on with other humans is through some sort of trust of each other?

I mean, you only have to look at Barings Bank or Enron or even the causes of the Credit Crunch to see how our habit of lying damages the entire world.

I wonder. What would happen if we decided to be different?
What if we decided to live our lives so that “honesty is the best policy”?

Psychologists say that you have to practice something 27 times before it becomes a habit.

27 times. 27 times of catching a lie just before it escapes from our lips.

The question is whether we are willing to rise above our upbringing, mother nature and the culture of our society.

Here’s to the dream of a world that has a truthful answer.

Stitched up? God & Clothes

2009-01-11T22:17:00.008Z

I’m going to tell you a secret. It’s something I’ve never told anyone. I haven’t even told Helen what I’m about to tell you. Prepare yourselves for this revelation; here it comes –

I don’t dress fashionably.

Phew. It’s kind of nice to get that off my chest. I feel I can get on with my life now without having to constantly look over my shoulder to see who’s watching me.

I never have followed fashion– although in the early 90’s fashion caught up with me and my style of dress fitted in roughly with the grunge movement. Dressing fashionably always seemed kind of pointless to me, as long as I have clothes to keep me warm and hide my unmentionables – for your sake as much as mine – that’ll do me.
I don’t get the point of fashion. In April last year I wrote about how I don’t like the financial markets and the seriousness with which they’re reported when the whole system is man-made (it’s on the old MySpace blog site). I view fashion in the same way but with the view that the fashion world is a total folly. The fashion world stands for nothing and achieves nothing. It’s made simply to perpetuate itself and the way it’s treated with superimposed importance belies the fact that it has nothing of value to say or contribute to the world. I have one word to say – floccinaucinihilipilification. Look it up in a dictionary.
That’s alright for me to say. I am and have always been a scruffy little man. But that doesn’t mean I don’t take care in my appearance, I just choose to look different from how the fashionistas dictate.

What you wear demonstrates a part of your personality. It gives you an identity. You can use what you wear to demonstrate your introversion or extroversion, your mood, your tastes in music, your school or profession. So when the fashion police tell us what we should be wearing they’re denying a fundamental part of our humanity. We are all individual; we should all dress as individuals.
However hard we try though, we do make judgements about people by what they’re wearing. We label people according to what they look like and if that label is one we don’t like we often don’t give that person a fair chance to prove themselves. I once turned up to a Church to help lead the service and - despite the fact that I had preached there before - because I was unshaven, scruffy and long-haired the door stewards directed me towards the alcoholics anonymous meeting that was happening in a different room to the service.
Oscar Wilde said, "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” I think I know where he was coming from. The whole idea of changing your wardrobe every 6 months has very limited appeal to me. I do have winter clothes and summer clothes, but that’s for practical reasons – I don’t annually renew what I wear. I have clothes in my wardrobe that I wear quite regularly which I bought in the early 90s - my blog jumper was bought in 1997 and my oldest T-shirt which I wear regularly – although not in public – I got in 1989. And here’s another thing that I think is silly: fashion houses defend their high prices claiming that you’re paying for better quality fabrics and stitching so their clothes will last. I don’t buy expensive clothes and they last longer than the fashion houses would want you to wear things for, so by their argument, they could do things cheaper as it’ll last long enough anyway.

And this is all before we even begin looking beyond the actual clothes on our backs. I think our attitude to our clothes speaks a much about us as what we wear, but it’s a private statement, not one we make to the world. Do we consider whether our clothes have been sweat-shop produced or fairly traded? Do we recycle them when we’re done with them? How much consideration we put into these things demonstrates our attitude to the world around us. As with all our actions as consumers our choices have implications for other people and our planet - implications bigger than whether the colour suits us or if it makes our bums look big.

Watching Paint Dry? God & Church.

2008-12-15T09:28:00.002Z

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’ve always been ahead of my time. Whereas you lot got bored of Church in your teens and stopped going, I left Sunday school when I was 7. I still had to go to Church though, but preferred to sit in the service with my Mum then go to Sunday school. After I finished my training and was made a local preacher my old Sunday School teacher came and congratulated me with tears of pride in her eyes, which quickly turned to tears of long-felt pain as she related the tale of the 7 year old who told her that he was bored of what she was doing and stormed out the room never to return. She retired from Sunday school teaching shortly after that.

And yet here I am just a few years later (OK more than just a few) a fully paid up member of the People-Who-Not-Only-Go-To-Church-But-Contribute-To-Whatever-Happens-On-A-Sunday Club. So what’s happened to make a difference? Do I still get bored of what happens on a Sunday? If so, how and why do I cope?

The first thing to say is, yes I do still find that Church can be dull. There are times when, instead of feeling uplifted, I feel frustrated, sometimes even angry. But the way that I’ve come to view Church has changed, so I can cope with Sunday mornings being bland because of what else Church has become to me.

Over the years Church has done a lot for me, maybe that’s a reason I’ve stuck with it. After I’d decided I wasn’t interested in playing the rubbish they make you learn for school concerts it was Church that offered me the opportunities to play music in public, and it was Church that gave me the first chances I had to mess around with PA gear and recording. I met many great people through Church, and my friends from ‘back home’ are all church friends some of whom I’ve known for over 20 years. At Church I felt listened to and I fitted in more than I ever did at school.
That’s an experience that continued as I moved around. Churches I’ve attended have been welcoming and when I’ve sat in a Church as a visitor and participated in traditional Methodist Worship it’s been like putting on an old familiar jumper – perhaps a bit shabby round the edges and something you wouldn’t want to be judged for wearing but it’s warm and comforting and holds a lot of good memories.

But Church is more than just a nostalgic trip - Church is for the here and now. Church still offers me opportunities to be heard – through this blog and through my being a local preacher, and although I don’t play much music in Church anymore I’m still frequently found at the back of the room sitting behind a mixing desk trying to look important. And there’s still more that Church offers – I seem to lead a charmed existence free from the difficulties which dog some people, but I know from experience that I can count on the Church for support when such events occur. I’ve seen many people supported and uplifted through difficult times by their Church. Knowing that there are people who do care for you and are willing to help you is of itself a source of strength, and this is what a Church can provide.

But Church is even more than that! What I’ve described above is a social club, there has to be something that makes Church unique. I discovered what it was when I was in my teens. I discovered that this God thing that people talked about was of interest to me and I started to explore what that meant. I soon realised that the people who frequented Church also had an interest in God and an experience of Him and so as people shared and talked about what they knew of God it strengthened my own ideas and they turned into a faith. Church became a means to an end. The point of Church wasn’t Church. The point of Church was as a vehicle to reach God, and as such a vehicle - for all it’s faults and weaknesses - it’s objective and ideals keeps me coming back to further my own journey.

Not everyone’s experience is like mine. A lot of people have very bad experiences in Churches. Church is often called a ‘family’ and a lot of the good experiences I’ve described can be paralleled in a family, and just like there are good families and bad families so there are good Churches and bad Churches. Even when we find a good Church there will be bad points to it – just as there’s always a family member you don’t get on with you’ll find a Church member who you find annoying, difficult, hostile, un-accepting or any other negative human reaction you care to name. Like a family the bad experiences we have in Church hurt more because of what Church is meant to be. Sometimes our families can do us great damage – as can Church. But with Church we can find a new place to undo the damage and learn to belong.

Just like in a family, we need to be an active participant in Church to get the most out of it. It doesn’t do any good simply sitting and moaning about how there is nothing of interest to us at Church. We have to actively effect the change we want to see in Church to make it interesting and relevant. We have to be the Church we want to belong to

This is what Café Sundae tries to do – we try to demonstrate the Church in action as we see it should be, and help others find their place in Church and in Gods family.

Yobs & Codgers? God & Ageism

2008-11-11T23:55:00.005Z

This month's blog is in the form of the above video. Just a quick word of explanation, Cafe Sundae is a monthly event where the videos I make to accompany my blogs are shown: so when I refer to putting your hand up and looking around you in this blog I'm talking directly to those attending the event.

Under the Influence? God & Intoxication

2008-10-12T22:36:00.002+01:00

It’s almost impossible to have a reasonable discussion about drugs in this country as their mere mention causes hysteria and panic. A politician being able to say that they smoked marijuana at university but didn’t inhale is the stupidest thing I’ve heard and demonstrates perfectly the cul-de-sac we’ve got ourselves into when debating drugs. I don’t see the point of writing a blog in such a climate where I’m unable to write honestly about my experience, So for the next 5 minutes take your fingers away from the hysteria button and lets discuss drugs like adults rather than like a schoolgirl with a mouse in her satchel.

My drug of choice is alcohol. I enjoy drinking a wide range of wines, beers and spirits. In particular I love drinking real ale – I am a member of CAMRA (the campaign for real ale). My habit is socially acceptable but I have no qualms about categorising alcohol alongside the illegal drugs, as I know the effects they can have and the only real difference is that alcoholic drinks are legal.

Since the mid 90’s I’ve moved around on the edges of the music scene and as such I’ve witnessed the effects of drugs first hand. I’ve seen people take every drug with the possible exception of crack. If you get chance to observe it and they’re not trying to hide the fact they’ve taken something there’s a very obvious before and after. On the whole it doesn’t bother me, if you want to take something it’s your choice to take the risks, but the only drug I’m scared of is heroin.

In 1996 a film was released which caused a media storm. ‘Trainspotting’ was accused, by the popular press, of glamourizing heroin and the resulting publicity made it one of the biggest British films of all time. There’s a quote fairly early on in the film – “People think it's all about misery and desperation and death and all that… which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not stupid.” And here lies – in my opinion - one of our biggest mistakes when it comes to drugs. We are so scared of drugs that we can’t contemplate that there is anything positive to be said about them. In schools we drill home the message ‘drugs are bad’ and believe we are having a positive effect. But I doubt we are. I think our fear of drugs is transparent and results in the education we give lacking credibility. Surely it would be better to take a more honest approach and treat people like they’re not stupid.

The drugs debate can be split into 2 distinct camps, those against and those for. There are very few people who sit in the middle. Each camp has it’s own myths as the taboo nature of drugs has meant that very little money has been put into actual research on effects and addictions. The above argument that all drugs are evil is countered by a belief that they are harmless (often just a user in denial). This is particularly true of cannabis users. They will argue that cannabis is non-addictive and less harmful than alcohol. This much is probably true, but they will go on to say that there are no proven deaths from cannabis. This claim I cannot believe. Whereas it is possible to give yourself alcohol poisoning and drink yourself to death through excessive alcohol consumption I don’t think it’s possible to smoke yourself to death: but to claim that that there are no cannabis fatalities is a rose-tinted view. Cannabis alters your state of mind, dulls your perceptions and slows your reactions. Surely someone will have had an accident whilst high and died from their injuries. Prolonged excessive use of cannabis has also been linked with schizophrenia, an illness which has caused a number of deaths. Most people smoke cannabis with tobacco. Many cannabis smokers will hold the smoke in the lungs to give the THC the maximum amount of time to be absorbed into the lungs. This also lets the over 200 harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke chance to be absorbed as well, so maybe you can say that cannabis hasn’t directly caused deaths, but to claim that it’s harmless and no-one has died as a result of taking cannabis is naïve at best. The anti-drug lobby also point at cannabis and claim that it leads onto harder drugs. Again this is a half-truth. I know many people – myself included – who have smoked cannabis and have no interest in anything harder than that. Taking cannabis doesn’t have to be a slippery slope to hard drug addiction. More often than not it isn’t. I would actually say that if you asked hard-drug addicts what the first drug they tried was, most would say cannabis, but revise their choice to alcohol if it were made clear that it was included in the list, and yet alcohol doesn’t get that kind of reputation because it’s legal and socially acceptable. Some of the pro-cannabis lobby uses that half-truth to argue for the legalization of cannabis arguing that when you go and buy your eighth, if the opportunity to buy something harder were removed fewer people would make the jump.

My biggest problem with drug taking is the illegality. Not really because it’s against the law, but because it’s in the hands of criminal elements. The money you spend on your chemical hobby is going to end up making money for people you wouldn’t invite into your home. There is no kite mark for drugs, no quality assurance. When you’re about to inhale your white powder what you’re ingesting will have been handled at some point by people with no moral scruples. It’s fairly well documented that harder drugs are cut with many different chemicals which bear a resemblance to the drug in question, and these are going to take their toll on the body as much as the drug is. At least with my alcohol habit being state endorsed I know that what I’m buying is what it’s supposed to be.

There will be those reading this who will want me to say to young people ‘Don’t do drugs,’ but I don’t believe that would make the blindest bit of difference if I did. But I will say this. The fact is that there are risks to drug taking, regardless of the drug in question. Whatever you choose to use – be it legal or illegal – be aware of the risks, and be aware of what it does to you. Use intoxicants responsibly - the same drug has different effects of different people. We’ve all seen news footage of fights in town centres on a Saturday night caused by people drinking too much. Alcohol doesn’t make me aggressive, but if it did I hope I’d have the sense not to drink it. Look after yourself and those around you make sure you don’t develop a problem. Don’t kid yourself that what you’re doing has no consequences.

There is a problem in this country with drug use. It stems from people not realizing that recreational intoxication is a serious business.

Big Bob's Happyland?: God & Zimbabwe

2008-09-15T19:09:00.000+01:00

There is an obvious problem to sitting down and writing a blog about Zimbabwe; and that is that the situation is likely to change and so what I write becomes obsolete. Maybe I flatter myself, but I like to think that in 6 months, a year, 5 years however long someone may want to read my meagre scribblings and I’d like them still to be valid. So to write about current affairs presents a problem – they don’t stay current.

As I sit and write this the BBC news website is reporting that Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai have agreed a power sharing deal the details of which will be formally announced next week so things are hopefully going to improve drastically for the Zimbabwean people. But it doesn’t help me write my blog!

During his time in office Mugabe has dragged Zimbabwe into the gutter; he’s ruined what was a thriving agricultural sector and driven the Zimbabwean economy to ruin. He’s controlled the media in Zimbabwe and restricted and banned foreign journalists and foreign aid workers. The people of Zimbabwe have borne the brunt of his policies and they’ve suffered greatly. Meanwhile the international community has sat back and let it happen. Many people and organisations have called for action against Mugabe but their cries have fallen on deaf ears and governments have taken very little action to try to implement change in Zimbabwe.

But can we actually take the moral high ground? It goes without saying that wherever in the world we in the West call for change – be it Zimbabwe, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, China Darfur or any of the many troublespots in the world – the leaders in that country will reject what we say. But how can they justify it to their people (presuming they report it)? The obvious way is to decry our moral record and say, “…And they think they can tell us what to do!” For cultures which are more tightly regulated than ours this is an easy thing to do. For example those countries that forbid alcohol they can just point to our numbers of alcoholics and binge drinking statistics. Cultural differences such as that have been used since time immemorial as propaganda and we do it as much as anyone else. But it doesn’t actually take very long to find things in our recent history which do more serious damage to our credibility as arbiters of justice. During the 1980s Britain poured money and armaments into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as it was seen as the best form of opposition to the Ayatollah’s Iran which we thought was the biggest threat to the West. Then from the early 90s onwards Saddam became public enemy number 1. Our support or opposition of foreign regimes has been based entirely on how useful they are to us, and has paid no attention at all social justice or their Human rights record. More recently Britain and the US have engaged in a war in Iraq which is widely regarded as illegal. So when we, or our Government, protest to Mugabe (or the leader of another country) about how their countries are run, it’s very easy for them to dismiss what we say because our own moral record can be viewed as very shaky.

So why haven’t we done more to intervene in Zimbabwe? Why has Robert Mugabe been able to continue his abuse of power for so long? Firstly to answer this we need to acknowledge the place Britain has in Zimbabwean History. Very briefly Zimbabwe is a former British colony only gaining it’s independence from Britain in 1980. Throughout the 70s a war of independence was fought and the Zanu party of Robert Mugabe was a major part of the struggle. When independence was gained Mugabe became a hero to the Zimbabwean People and was courted as such on the international stage. Fast forward to today and Britain is still seen as the former colonial occupier, so we cannot become too involved in direct confrontational action against Mugabe as we are still viewed as a hostile nation by many of the Zimbabwean people – our help would be viewed with some suspicion.

But the international community has also failed to act - other than to ban Mugabe, his government and his wife from travelling to the EU and the US. We have all sat back and watched the suffering of the Zimbabwean people and said, “That’s not very nice is it.” No-one has suggested going into Zimbabwe on humanitarian grounds – as we supposedly went into Iraq – this may be because our action in Iraq was deeply unpopular with the international community, or it may because Zimbabwe has nothing the world wants. It has no oil and its economy and infrastructure are so damaged it has become an unattractive and expensive prospect for any foreign power.

The UN would perhaps be the obvious vehicle for an international attempt to change Zimbabwe, but the UN charter states that it can only intervene when countries are threatening other countries, not their own people so the UN can’t – or won’t – get involved.

It would seem that we have tied our own hands in dealing with situations such as this: maybe we need to take stock of the situation and see if the rule book needs re-making.

So what can we do? To be honest I don’t know! The situation is changing and until we see what shape it takes it’s difficult to suggest anything. All we can do is keep an eye on the situation whilst continuing to lobby our MPs and support organisations working in Zimbabwe (hopefully the doors will be opened to more aid organisations soon). We must continue to support the Zimbabwean people, hold them in our thoughts and prayers and keep their stories circulating in order to keep the eyes of the world focussed in their direction.

My Precious: God & Bling

2008-09-11T19:30:00.001+01:00

I’ve been procrastinating. I’ve been putting off writing this blog because I don’t really know what to write. Even this evening I’ve done every other job I can conceivably do to avoid starting writing without it looking too obvious (but goodness only knows who I’m trying to kid) and even now I’ve written 5 ½ lines without even coming close to mentioning the topic of this months blog.

I guess the problem is that I don’t really understand jewellery. I wear a modest amount, and don’t demonstrate any interest in expanding my collection – or Helen’s. I think I’ve made a decision at some point; I don’t have – and I’m unlikely to have - the money to indulge myself in lots of jewels, and to do so would be pointless, jewellery is a luxury item, and the definition of a luxury is an item we can do without, so it’s an aspect of life I’ve ignored. So all I can really do in this blog is give you a couple of observations I’ve made about bling and see what you think about them.

The first thing to note is why people wear jewellery. Since civilisation began people have decorated their bodies, and jewellery has formed a major part of this along with tattoos and a variety of different styles of clothes for different occasions. Jewellery and accessories can bring an outfit to life, putting the finishing touches to how a person looks. But it is used for more than just that. The type of jewellery worn by your average hip-hopper is different to that worn by your average goth, jewellery provides a badge of identity and a sign of belonging. It also indicates social status; the type of jewellery worn by the upper classes is very different to that worn by the working classes. Jewellery is used to demonstrate wealth. So far that’s all fairly obvious.

The biggest blingers are hip-hop artists. The way they use their jewellery is in massively ostentatious shows of wealth. Way back in the 80s when hip-hop came to the attention of the world it was the music of the streets. It was music that the population of the ghettoes of New York could make as it involved very little financial outlay. Beat boxing was a way of creating beats without having to buy any percussion instruments, Dj-ing and scratching similarly were ways of creating sounds and textures using items most people would already have in their possession. It disposed of ‘elitist’ musical practices and gave music back to the man on the street. But as it’s success has grown and it has become a multi-million dollar musical genre it’s proponents have chosen to separate themselves from that origin by very sporting very gaudy and obvious shows of wealth. Sociologically they’re not alone in doing this; most people who escape poverty will seek to demonstrate publicly how far away from their roots they are, but it makes me wonder whether hip-hop is still ‘the music of the streets’ and whether those who are still in the ghettoes feel ownership or betrayal because or in spite of it.

There is only one thing I can think of that’s a bigger blinger than hip-hop and that’s religion. Over history many monuments, cathedrals and mausoleums have been built that have been dripping in gold and jewels. It’s supposed to reflect the glory of God, but it just makes me do a little bit of sick in my mouth. That the Christian Church is rich is something that would be debated by treasurers up and down the country. That the Church historically has been wealthy is a fact. Whether the Church has used its wealth for the good of the people – as God would require - is a highly debatable point, and one that I leave you with. If we are happy seeing images of slums surrounding great cathedrals that are caked in gold leaf and marble then all is ok. If we are not happy with such images and demand that the Church should be helping people escape poverty then we need to effect change, and that change will start with your own attitude to your own wealth.