Easter Monday walk along the old Roman road near Carlops with the wife-to-be and the soon to be stepson. We endured about five different types of weather in the course of an hour an a half including a few snow squalls. Cold pasta and hot coffee at the halfway point.

Giles Fraser in the Church Times

I'm not over fond of many of the things which Giles Fraser writes. I really liked this.

Getting things together

We've had a good Holy Week. It was a bit of a round robin amongst the local churches - 3 Church of Scotland congregations and the Roman Catholic Church. We generally had pretty good crowds and the clergy all got a chance to preach a sermon to members of other flocks. Tonight we're hauling our home-made Paschal candle up the street and lighting a fire in the parking lot of the neighbouring Church of Scotland as we add Holy Saturday to the ecumenical list. Our choir is uncertain. As for the presbies affected, they have a locum minister who has come out of retirement to take care of them during their interregnum. He's rolling his eyes a bit. I'm not sure he was expecting this but he's decided to 'go with the flow'.

Tomorrow we gather in the local graveyard at 5:25 a.m. with lit candles, say a few prayers and then make our way up to the hill behind St James with at least a mandolin and probably a guitar to watch the sun rise at 5:55. Thence to St James' hall for bacon and eggs and then back for Mass at 11:00. I'll miss it all when it's over.

What you see

on the road to Carlops

in Holy Week

The earth is black and freshly turned
The sharp and comestible smell is
walnuts and lemon or maybe
fresh leaves crushed between the fingers.

A blade reverses the settled order.

Winter thatch is sundered and uprooted.
Something vital flows from the furrows.

The tractor follows its even course along the ground
with nothing to negotiate.

A cloud of screaming gulls follows for good or ill

at a safe distance.

Palm Crosses

It took us a while to remember what we were doing.

The diagram we had saved from last year and printed out proved to be of little use.

On the other hand, the story about the bunny going twice around the tree and the other bunny going round the back, up and down into the rabbit hole was more to the point and provided much better results.

MCMLVIII - a very very long time ago

There - it's just gone midnight. Today (friday) is my 50th birthday. It's just starting to hit me. I'm 50 today. 50 is extremely old. Life is pretty well half over!

I do occasionally wake up in the morning and ask myself whether I'm really as old as all that. I shake my head for a moment and wonder is there's been a mistake. I know where the years have gone - I was there when they went, but it seemed like it was just yesterday that I was turning 30 (and feeling old then)

Other people born in 1958

Andie MacDowell
Holly Hunter
Jamie Lee Curtis
Kate Bush (yeah, okay - she's old!)
Madonna
Michelle Pfeiffer
Sharon Stone
Tim Burton
Viggo Mortensen

Looking at it this way, of course, 50 is not that old. These folks aren't old. These people are more or less just like me - plus botox and regular time in the gym, singing lessons, agents to get them gigs and - therapy.

I guess turning 50 is better than the alternative.

Now I'll head off. It's past my bedtime.

This morning's Thought for the Day on BBC Scotland. A couple of spoonerisms - 'Oath of Loyalty' became 'Loath of Oyalty' but hey, it's early in the morning. The hedgehogs were just going to bed.

The whole idea of young people taking an Oath of Loyalty is not even the flavour of the month - it's the flavour of the second half of this week.

From the morning's papers: Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian and Daniel Hannan in the Torygraph on more or less the same subject. This will all have gone away by the end of the week and will be replaced by yet another silly quick fix cooked up by a Focus Group.

A Greek tailor bumps into

his client in the Agora

First man: Euripides?

Second man: Yes, Eumenides?

Tavener's Requiem available on BBC 3

The premiere of Sir John Tavener's Requiem is available on the Radio 3 site only for another day or two. The programme begins with selections from Rachmaninov's Vespers and finishes with Tavener's work.

Tavener is, apparently, seriously ill at the moment and was unable to attend on the evening the piece was recorded. The orchestra was set up in the form of a crucifix with the cello soloist at the very centre of the cross. The last ten minutes of the Requiem will stay with me for a long time.

Steve Tilley over at Mustard Seed Shavings has been stripping away lot of excess language as part of his Lenten observance and posting mostly in haiku form. This has led to such spine-chilling little nuggets as

Visit Christ Church
Sort out the Alpha course food
Not many takers

I guess a lot of haiku experts have passed by his website. Some have clearly made comments, provoking the following outburst:

"Look you bunch of pedants. Brummies make two syllables where one is written. Japanese make the punctuation count as a syllable. Haiku is more an intention than a form. It is just oh I can't be bothered the rest is a quote from a web-site explaining stuff like this:"

Crack on Steve! Square your shoulders. They're all Philistines! They will not be numbered among the Just.

NB. The outburst could have been written thus:

Frankly, can't be arsed.

Further explanation here

Lighten up, won't you?

Commonwealth Day 2008

Today is Commonwealth Day. The day you give thanks for, among other things, Canadians.

You'll know who we are. We're the ones lining up at the Garlicky Little Foreign People with Dodgy Passports queue at Immigration while the Finns and Lithuanians breeze through with EU passports.

A tradition designed to compensate for all those years of ignoring and overlooking us is the giving of quite splendid gifts to Commonwealth citizens on the second Monday in March. Best wishes to Canadians and other Commonwealth citizens can be left here in the comments box. Monetary gifts or gifts in bottles with consonant-heavy Scottish names printed on them can be sent via the post.

An article in the Telegraph bemoaning recent attempts to restrict Commonwealth immigration can be found here.

Teach your children to cherish their nearest Canadian vicar (and not to bang their hard church shoes on the pew during his children's talk) by going to the Young Commonwealth site.

Lying in bed covered in bandages with tubes hanging out of you? The Commonwealth Nursing Federation has some ideas for celebrating Commonwealth Day.

My 'Commonwealth moment' came about ten years ago standing under the Menin Gate in Ieper (Ypres) Belgium. A bugler from the Ypres Fire Department plays the Last Post every night at 8:00 pm. School children from around the world visit the site. Not infrequently one of them is asked to read the usual fragment of McCrae's poem - "they shall not grow old.....". This particular evening it was a little girl visiting from New Zealand with her family who took her job very seriously - solemn little Kiwi dipthongs echoing throughout the chamber. Her dad was visibly chuffed and clearly proud of her.

On the wall were the large number of names (among others from around the Empire) of members of my regiment - the Canadian Grenadier Guards - who were killed in battle and whose bodies were never recovered and identified.

Palm Crosses

It's coming up to that time of year again. This Saturday morning at 10:00 we're gathering in the Hall with the children and anyone else who feels 'young at heart' to make the Palm Crosses for Sunday. There are several ways of making them and everybody swears by their own method. Each year we gather and the first thing we have to do is remember how we did them last year. Some of the methods involve a single piece of palm. We don't do it that way - we use two.

We use two because, erm, of the two natures of Christ - the divine and the human.

We use two pieces of palm because *thinking.....* of the two Gospel Sacraments - Baptism and Holy Communion.

No? Okay, we use two because that's how we were taught us a few years back and we're Anglicans and when we find something that works we stick with it like tar to an old boot.

So, in anticipation of Saturday's get-together to make palm crosses, I post here the a pictorial guide on the web which illustrated the way we do it. I post it simply as an aide-memoire for myself so I don't look like an utter pillock on Saturday morning.

-- - - - - - -

Joe Walker (Diocese of Edmonton in Canada) has published his sermon notes for next Sunday. Worth a read!

Frequently wrong but never in doubt

Glad to see that there's somebody out there who's as grumpy and opinionated as I am. Well done, Fr Heron!

De Mille is De Man



via Scott Gunn via Bishop Alan

An article from the Daily Mail. I'm sure it's as true as anything else the Daily Mail publishes.

Following the never-ending theme here in the UK that you can't be too careful it appears that lamp-posts in parts of London are now to be padded.

Readings for the 5th Sunday in Lent

I'll be doing the Family Service in one of my churches this Sunday which is a slightly truncated affair. Wishing I had a little more sermon-time for readings such as these.

Mare Winningham 'Valley of the Dry Bones'



The old standard by The Delta Rhythm Boys



The Raising of Lazarus from
The Greatest Story Every Told

Little Dark Poet

Before it's too late.....

I am heading out over the next couple of days to visit a very ancient lady who spent her life as Penicuik's Registrar. Somebody meticulous - as you might imagine - a member of our little 8:00 service at St James.

Penicuik no longer has a town hall where births and deaths can be registered, certain debts settled and payments made. You drive through our town and you are struck by the fact that our Centre has collapsed. Businesses are boarded up. The appropriate role for us in life now is to be a good bedroom community for Edinburgh. Left behind on all sorts of levels are the locals. Banks close and Cheque Cashing outlets and betting shops open in their stead. Never say we don't provide for the local people!

The closing of the Town Hall and the withdrawal of local services was all going on at about the time I arrived here from Canada and I was only dimly aware of the controversy. I had a couple of the battle-weary in my congregation. Yes, it is a shame, I said. You'll have to go to Dalkeith to do these things. I didn't think too much about it at the time. The town hall was reborn under different coverings as a resource-to-the-community-but-not-a-town hall. Not the same thing. There was a committee struck to oversee it. They spent as much time fighting with each other as they did managing the resource.

Simon Jenkins' article in the Guardian last week was about the nationalization of social responsibility and the weakness of our social contracts at the local level. A few highlights:

The nearest any British community has to local government these days is the police force. Local leadership is a 999 call. Whether it is a rape epidemic, an unruly school, trouble with immigrants, a released paedophile or bingeing teenagers, the community appears before the world as a police officer. There may be walk-on parts for a firefighter, a priest and, bringing up the rear, a national MP. But the figure of reassurance and authority in any British town nowadays is in uniform (which is why Muslims turn to their mullahs).

he continues:

Go to any community abroad, whether in America or France or Germany or the Netherlands, and that figure will be a locally elected official, normally a mayor.

and then the clincher:

In France there is an elected official for every 120 people, which is why French micro-democracy is alive and kicking. In Germany the ratio is 1:250; in Britain it is 1:2,600. In France the smallest unit of discretionary local government (raising some money and running some services) is the commune, with an average population of 1,500. In Germany that size is 5,000 people. In Britain the average district population is 120,000, and even that body can pass the blame for any service deficiency to central government.

Misery Literature

And while we're on the subject of larger-than-life caricatures: What about those nuns! The Magdalene Laundries closed down in Ireland in 1996 for any number of good reasons. Everybody ought to be glad to see the back of the whole enterprise. The 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters is pretty grim viewing by anybody's estimate.

Not everybody on the bandwagon, though, appears to be quite who they say they are. A subsequent 2005 book by Kathy O'Beirne entitled "Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries" (or "Don't Ever Tell", as it was marketed in the UK) has recently been decried as a work of fiction.

O'Beirne told of being tortured by her labourer father, experimented upon in a psychiatric hospital, and raped by no fewer than four priests and a policeman. Then there was her spell in a Magdalene laundry, one of Ireland's notorious Church-run homes for "fallen women", where, aged 14, she gave birth to a daughter.

Problem is that the story doesn't add up - the daughter doesn't exist - the sisters of the Magdalen Laundries were apparently very good at one thing at least - keeping records - and no records of Kathy O'Beirne can be found. Nobody at the laundries in those years can remember her.

Fiction is good. Misery fiction clearly occupies a place in the psyche of those who purchased one of the 400,000 copies of "Kathy's Story" which flew off the shelves. Their troubled lives seemed more manageable perhaps when compared to the life being described.

Or maybe it is just pornography under another guise.

The problem lies with the fact that real people are being implicated in these events.

...what makes the O'Beirne saga so troubling.....is that it fuels Ireland's obsession with clerical sex abuse, and the abuse-claim industry. O'Beirne herself accused Fr Fergal O'Connor, founder of the homeless hostel Sherrard House, of raping her in the 1970s. The investigation took a year, during which the 77-year-old University College Dublin professor was prevented from visiting his own workplace. Yet Fr O'Connor was virtually crippled by arthritis when the alleged crimes took place, unable even to shake hands because of the pain, according to a friend. The priest was exonerated two days before his death.

Charity workers and members of religious orders working in the 19th and early 20th century probably would have the right to demand that stories about their misdeeds be subject to a modicum of scrutiny. They are people, after all, and not merely monsters.

Lizards that just don't quit ............

I finally got around to seeing Cloverfield last night. I wanted to see it last Monday but the whole day-off fizzled following a death in the congregation and a series of phone calls and other obligations. My fiancee doesn't like films like this. My future stepson would have loved it but wouldn't have slept afterwards so it was strictly a solo affair. Once I'm married to his mother I'll take him to films like this when he's being a little sod. I'll put him to bed afterwards, shut off the light and close the door. Periodically I'll walk by the door and make this sound.



Any of you who were watching B-movies in the fifties and sixties will have to explain to me how on earth the original Godzilla movies inspired anything more than a chuckle. One is taught to treat past generations with a measure of patience. You did endure the War after all - the Blitz, Mock Apple Pie, Glenn Miller - and, yes, you may now be incontinent, dribbling and forever accusing the orderlies of stealing your teeth. But how lame is the idea of people screaming and covering their eyes at what is clearly an out-of-work circus midget stumping around a baptistry in a rubber suit kicking over a three foot model of a bridge. And the Atomic Breath? Yet another even smaller midget with a paintbrush colouring in the squares of film.

Which is a long way of saying hats off to anybody who can resurrect the Godzilla/Gojira tradition and have the film end up being really quite scary.

The film begins with the theft of an idea from the Blair Witch Project about a bit of video data being found by accident. In this case the data is contained in a castoff video camera found in "what was" Central Park in New York City. Special effects abound throughout the movie - money was spent in copious amounts but the point of view is that of a rather stupid boy named Hudd who's been given a cam-corder and told to record the evening's festivities - a surprise party for his best friend's brother who's leaving the next day to take up a junior management job in Japan.

The entire movie is filmed in Not-Too-Steady-Cam, then, with quite thrilling results. The first twenty minutes are difficult to endure. Pouty young women, vacuuous youths trading gossip and scandal. We knew we'd come to see a scary movie. Oh for God's sake send the Creature in! Don't force us to endure the late-teen, early-twenty crowd with their up-talk and their petty scandals. Stock characters do abound - a stupid boy who manages to be charmingly naive, a protagonist caught between two choices, a grumpy sister, the female Object of Desire, the mysterious stranger-girl. You're trying to figure out all the connections and you're not quite bored yet when the first earthquake hits and reports of explosions come in over the television. The giant lizard starts wreaking havoc in the city.

The original Godzilla movies didn't arise, like the monster, from a submarine trench. They reflect the anxiety felt by most in the early years of the Nuclear age. It was, as I remember, the testing of the Hydrogen Bomb which was alleged to have released the creature into the world. In the long run, though, the movies were a lot more fun than they were therapeutic. Cloverfield has woven within its plot all sorts of markers of post-911 anxiety as well. One scene of people cowering inside a convenience store as the monster passes is very nearly an exact replica of the famous bit of footage from September 11th in New York. There is, however, no real therapeutic task to the film and it ends up being a good ride.

All of the stock preamble at this point both begins to make sense and to (mercifully) disappear when the monster begins its rampage. This is a good film which eats its own schlock and demonstrates what another age might have been so scared about in its day. Go see the film if it's still around. Don't wait for the video!

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.

On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The Sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

~R.S. Thomas (1972)

Via Elizaphanian via Madpriest. Thanks.

God's Country

A long and eloquently written piece in this month's edition of The Atlantic on Christianity and Islam in Nigeria called God's Country by Eliza Griswold.

Calling all Scottish Episcopal Bloggers

At least those within reasonably quick driving distance of a small town just to the south of Edinburgh. Our local folkies - a group called Herken which is drawn from St James Episcopal Church and the Penicuik Folk Club - have put together an evening of hymns and folk music with a special emphasis on "...a strain of Christian music that borrows, without saying so, from traditional songs and tunes." It's this Sunday evening at 6:30 pm.

The website for Herken give you a link to the current project which is called Of Earth and Altar. Take a peek at their other stuff as well. Follow the link at the bottom of that page to call up a .pdf file with the evening's offerings of songs and readings. Bring yourself. Bring a carload!

Regarding the statement somewhere that

"The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, stops work at 6pm so he can watch The Simpsons."

I thought Rowan Williams had already been featured in an episode of The Simpsons. Did I dream that?

Didn't Homer look puzzled and claim to know Rowan from somewhere and then ask whether he'd brought the Hobbits along?

Second childhood is clearly at hand. Fantasy and reality are blurring at the edges and it's all Brian Reid's fault

Blogger Rebounds

Derek the Anglican has been quiet for a while. It happens. Somebody whose blog you check in on every once in a while suddenly appears to drop off his perch and you suppose that it's Lent and they've taken a vow, they have a life, work, family etc.

Well it appears our Derek got bitten by a Brown Recluse Spider, took ill and ended up in the ICU. He's back on his perch but sheee...it!

That's not the sort of thing that's suppose to happen to a medievalist! Steve Irwin, okay. He poked 'em and prodded 'em. I'm beginning to wonder which other recently silenced voices have been trapped in quicksand, trampled by elephants, or hunted down by pygmies with blowpipes.

Then again, maybe it's just Lent.

Canadian Sermon Types

Pastor Neil Young (what else! Yes that's his name!) who is the minister at Erindale United Church in Mississauga Ontario came up with these various styles of sermon common in the Greatest Nation on Earth. These classifications might help my Scottish congregation understand their expat priest a little better. Thanks to the blog Out of Ur for these:

The Maple Syrup: Boils source material down to about 1/50th its starting volume.

The Mountie: When it's most dressed-up, it doesn't arrest anybody.

The Igloo: Goes 'round and 'round until a final capstone is dropped in.

The Curling: Kind of incomprehensible, but everybody seems to have a good time.

The Lacrosse: Fast, hard-hitting, and it's hard to see the points as they're made.

The Hockey Fight: Staggers unsteadily, swinging wildly, but lands a punch or two.

The Canadian: Overly apologetic.

The Snowmobile: Loud and a bit obnoxious, but takes you places you otherwise wouldn't go.

The Beaver: Dams everything in sight.

The Maple Leaf: Has 11 points; always ends up falling to the ground.

Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl........

I'm one of her devoted subjects (that's me in black and white to the right of the picture) but that doesn't stop me from laughing out loud at this. Thank you Jonathan! Sensitive monarchists might best avoid it.

Why we don't do weddings during Lent

Following her wedding, an old-fashioned girl crawled into bed for the first time beside her new husband. She snuggled up to him and was surprised at his lack of response. In fact, he rolled over and began to fall asleep.

"So why aren't we going to make love on our wedding night", she asked finally.

"Because it's Lent" came the reply.

"That's nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I've never heard anything more ridiculous in my life. It's been lent to whom and for how long?"

A Lenten Exercise for Progressive Clergy

Sushipizza!

A little something from Andrew Brown's blog which will warm the heart of your Norwegian-speaking Italian/Japanese girlfriend and make up for the fact that you forgot Valentine's Day.

Multiculturalism made an appearance on the menu in this morning's Thought for the Day on Radio Scotland - querying the need for every linguistic and religious grouping ultimately to form its own nation (thinking of Kosovo). Diversity in the Church - or the lack of it - a perennial issue on most church blogs these days (think splintering churches in Western Canada).

I'm hoping, however, that there are happier alternatives to cultural and ecclesiastical homogeneity than Sushipizza!

see also: Jellied Salads

This article from this morning's Telegraph touched all my Victor Meldrew buttons. We are turning into very silly people!

....the general rise in our prosperity has led to a corresponding decline in common sense. We have become over-responsive to outside threats, more paranoid about the way our inventions are killing us, and we are eager to buy safety for our children and ourselves at any cost.

The United Steelworkers of Montreal deserve some international exposure. So, um, we'll start with the south of Scotland. Everyone from Hawick to Bonnyrigg - listen up! They've got a couple of disks out and a few of their songs can be heard in the traditional manner but, to my knowledge, this is their first posh video. Enjoy!

If you're going to jump a fence in order to chase rabbits in the field next door you'd better make sure you can clear it.

Good advice for Labrador Retrievers. Good advice all 'round, in fact.

Clio didn't manage the jump without catching the wire - poor wee dog is now at the Vet's getting her wounds tidied up. It's not very pretty.

Update:

Got a call from the vet saying that Clio was proving a terrible patient, flopping around after waking up from the anesthetic rather than merely sleeping it off and could I please come and pick her up since she'd probably sleep better at the Rectory. Well - she hasn't and has been staggering around walking into walls. A bit better as of late with the odd whimper. Tomorrow the stitches will no doubt start to itch and I'll have to put one of those cone things around her neck. The other dogs will laugh at her.

Bread for the eater and seed for the sower.....

Having heard a tale of woe for decades about the state of farming in Canada (and by extension, the rest of North America) it's good to hear that the farmers are happy.

Good on them. They deserve it.

Something weepy for Lent and beautiful for Valentine's Day

Lenten videos were leaping out at me last year. I've had no luck finding anything new this year. From last year's list.

Toys for Lent I

Some of us are 'hands on' types and some of us aren't. If your family's observance of Lent is missing a little je ne sais quoi you can always make a Salt Dough Crown of Thorns with your children and fill it with little spikes that the children can remove one by one each time they do something good. In so doing apparently, they will even make Jesus feel better.

"For each Lenten sacrifice a family member makes, he or she pulls a toothpick out of the crown. This activity makes a great visual reminder of Christ’s suffering: Parents can explain to their children that sin brings additional pain to Jesus’ suffering and good works can comfort Him and show our love for Him. "

If what you say doesn't make sense at least you'll be able to prove that at the end of the day you came up with something which was practical.

Scottish Episcopal Lenten Blog

Some of the Scottish Episcopal Bloggers have gotten together and put together a Lenten Blog called Beauty from Chaos. Take a look when you've got time. Kimberly Bohan, Rector of Dunoon, is the organizing force behind this blog which goes online today.

40

Found this during Lent last year. Thought I'd repost it. The comics are by a cartoonist named Simon Smith. Music by Joseph Arthur.

One doesn't need to completely jettison one's sense of humour during Lent. The famous Lenten episode of Father Ted entitled 'Cigarettes, Alcohol and Rollerblading' is now available here in three parts. The Scottish Episcopal Bloggers are all busy at work, you see, and I thought I'd try to be a useful little Canadian limpet and provide a service as well.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

The Martyrs of Japan (February 5th, 1597)

Padre Mickey down in Panama has a very good article (I can't rememher whether written by him or by somebody else) on the Martyrs of Japan. Their feast day is today. Other material here. Still more here.

65 years ago this week

A longish article worth reading about the sinking of the Dorchester in WWII and the four chaplains who were aboard. Thanks to T19 for the reference.

Can't help myself

A mother goes to church with her little girl.
The priest intones 'remember man thou art but dust...'

The little girl says 'Mummy, what's butt dust?'

Candlemas was yesterday. Today is the Feast of St Blaise when one is supposed to bless throats but there being scant precedent for the Service of the Blessing of Throats at St James' Penicuik we went ahead and modified our monthly Family Service along the lines of the Feast of the Presentation. Guitars, cellos, violins, a drum set, a djembe and a piano (me on the tambourine during a couple of the livelier ones). Candles were blessed. Things proceeded decently and in good order.

In the course of talking to the children about the various occasions where we still use candles in the course of our daily lives I spoke about their use as emergency equipment.

Years ago I was the Rector of Christ Church, Chibougamau and the Priest in Charge of St Barnabas' Waswanipi in the Diocese of Moosonee (northern Quebec). I lived in Chibougamau. My second point was 140 kilometres away. In order to say Mass in two places (twice a month, anyway) this made for a 280 kilometre round trip and it had to be undertaken rain or shine.

That particular corner of the world is a real snow belt - it gets as much snow as Winnipeg and it falls at inconvenient times. Add to this the occasional winter trip to our See City of Schumacher in Ontario (best approached via the back roads through Amos and Cochrane) and that makes one hell of a lot of winter driving in conditions which most people cannot imagine.

So it pays to be equipped. You can be stuck all night on one of these lonely roads without a soul coming along to help you. You keep a down-filled sleeping bag, extra matches, a jerry can of diesel, snow shoes, and a spray can of ether to spray into the air filter to give the engine a bit of a jump when you're starting it on a cold day. And candles.

A trick which I was taught by an old fellow who once ferried Lancaster Bombers over Greenland during the Second World War: You carry about a twenty ordinary builders' bricks and a box of emergency candles. If you have to ditch your bomber over Greenland or Franz Josef Land or if you wind up in a snowbank in the middle of northern Quebec you build a couple of small ovens out of the bricks and place a lit emergency candle in the midst of them. By isolating yourself in the truck or in the airplane's fusilage you can turn these little brick ovens into two small radiators which will prove adequate to keep you alive indefinitely.

Postnote:

Sam Thomas - our Regional Dean in those days - came to the Rectory in Chibougamau and noticed all the equipment lying in the back of my Toyota Landcruiser. After coming in and helping himself to a cup of tea Sam says to me:

Rob - couldn't help noticing that you've got an axe, ropes and a can of ether in your truck. It's no mystery to me why you can never get a date!

Fame and Fortune in Small Communities

Soon to be step-son was sitting in the back of the car the other day as I was driving him and his mother back to their house in West Linton. Children are always a good source of village gossip in West Linton. They share amongst themselves the things that their parents might not talk about in the Precinct so it's always 'all ears open' when the boy begins to speak. As I remember S was moaning that his life was dull and ordinary (as was, by extension, the lives of the adults connected to him).

As an example of what life could have looked like if he were luckier he gave us the example of one of the little girls in Primary 5.

"Her family's famous" he said
"They are?" I asked. "I didn't know that"
"Yes, of course they are. Her grandfather does the voice of the Gaelic* Pig on the television"

*Scottish Gaelic - not the other one

Rev'd Ruth - my colleague in Portobello reports:

“At a wedding ceremony that I was performing, I raised my hand to give the final blessing. The bride misunderstood my gesture and surprised me with a high-five. Not wanting to exclude the groom, I offered him a high-five, too. I was finally able to get my blessing in, amid the laughter of the guests.”

Gambia I

There's the Gambia for tourists and then there's Africa. The beach in front of our hotel regularly found itself traversed by a herd of local cattle. My daughter Hannah hasn't travelled much. We haven't actually spent an awful lot of time together over the last few years and since she was coming out to Scotland for Christmas the opportunity was there to take her somewhere hot and 'different'. Thomas Cook had some package deals for the Gambia so we booked some tickets. The country was wonderful - the hotel proved just a wee bit sealed off from the country. Relief came in the form of my colleague Kenny Macaulay from St Augustine's Church in Dumbarton in Glasgow Diocese who was coming down a couple of days later with his wife Linda. Kenny's been to the Gambia off and on now for a number of years - had his own wheels and knew his way around. So we got to see the country in the last four days of our trip.


We made a trip to Senegal. Bumped into a few fellow travelers from Scotland in the form of the Ospreys who were spending the winters in the mangrove swamps there. There's a Thought for the Day on BBC Scotland about this. The ferry ride across the mouth of the River Gambia was long and the return trip especially arduous and very hot. Shade was at a premium and Hannah managed to find herself a cool corner on the deck.

More pictures and stories later as I edit them and post them online

Good Clean Fun for Kids. The Zombie Walk

Something from the Edmonton journal in October - Canadians know how to have fun with their kids - October, yeah, which just before I kinda went offline sometime in November what with missing passports and all. I am now legal. No - not languishing in an immigration holding cell at the pleasure of the Home Secretary. Not dead - kinda Undead and looking forward to a busy Christmas and then off to the Gambia with my daughter for a week's holiday before returning and sending my passport off in the mail again for a Certificate of Approval to Marry. It's endless!

Back after a long journey, Raspberry Rabbit's new Canadian passport goes straight back into the mail for another adventure.........

The saga of the missing passport and the application for Further Leave to Remain in the UK continues.

It took a month - to the day - for the newly issued passport to travel by recorded delivery from the Canadian High Commission in London to my doorstep in Scotland. We've had a mail strike you see. Things have been stored in warehouses. The envelope arrived today (the 9th). I couldn't believe it. I'd already replaced the driver's license which was also in the envelope and ordered a new birth certificate from British Columbia. I was ready to apply for another passport. I looked at it several times, thumbed its pages, admired the fat and aging person depicted on the front page and wondered how I'd ever been young. Problem was - the passport was supposed to have been in Durham (thence to Croydon) last week in the company of an application to stay in this country a while longer.

I'd sent the application in on time but without the passport. I had found (surprisingly) a photocopy of the front page and the Residence Permit. I included that. I'd gotten a fax from London saying that the passport had indeed been issued. I included that. On Wednesday I did get a note from the immigration folks saying that they'd received the application and would I please not phone them to enquire about its progress. "We'll call you if anything is missing". The note had a reference number on it. I decided to risk a phone call anyway. The nice man named Dave at the enquiry line today said I could send it off to Croydon quoting the reference number and that it would be appended to my application. Which is what I did - special delivery - entrusting this document once again to the Royal Mail. Trusting that Dave hasn't led me astray. Every hopeful or maybe just desperate.

My parents are under strict instructions to stay well in the absence of my travel documents. I've a holiday booked with the daughter after Christmas which will require a passport. I'd even like to be admitted back into the UK at the end of the holiday. All is not yet completely sorted but it's looking better than it did a few weeks ago and your prayers and best wishes have been appreciated. One day I'll understand why things had to be this way.

It's that time again. The Annual Clergy Conference for stipendiary clergy in the Diocese of Edinburgh. This is not a holiday! No way, Jose! I suspect my parishioners may be nurturing visions of clergy sitting in groups telling jokes, drinking in the pub, griping about their lack of preferment, being nasty to the Dean and conspiring against the Bishop. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a priest I would not lie to you. Fact is - we simply get a good group rate at the Atholl Palace in Pitlochry. It just works out that way. It's just a place where we get together and work hard. We'd rather be at the Holiday Inn.

Things you can actually buy!

Andrew Brown makes reference to a geek gift he's looking forward to getting for Christmas. It's a t-shirt which actually measures the strength of the Wi-Fi signal where ever you happen to be walking at the time. I think the three AAA batteries sewn into the shirt might dangle uncomfortably and keep the garment from hanging properly. But if you're wearing one of these you're not exactly a slave to fashion, are you?

I don't know if anyone else has been adversely affected by the strikes at the Royal Mail but my new Canadian passport is hanging around formlessly in the void being played with by Schroedinger's Cat - probably languishing in a mail bag somewhere in the Edinburgh sorting office. It was sent on the 10th of October. My permission to remain in the UK runs out shortly and I need to bear said passport along with my person to the Immigration Office in Glasgow and apply for Further Leave to Remain. Something I can't do without my passport. Removal Orders and Deportation are really not my thing.

Needless to say I'm a tad anxious and desirous of your prayers for the successful arrival of this little blue booklet. All may pray - of whatever theological persuasion - making a joyful noise from the same songsheet!

Raspberry's Passport needs to be found.

V. Lord in your mercy,

R. Hear our prayer

The Rector's Warden from one of my congregations has just sent me this photograph saying that it reminded him of me. I don't see it. But then again as one of the world's truly execrable poets has said:

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us

To see oursel's as others see us!

I'm guessing the photographer was getting the message that the Winnie the Pooh costume he'd chosen for this particular shoot was less convincing wet and up close than it had been at a distance on the shore.

At my first couple of weddings here in the UK I was rather surprised by strange combinations of feathers sticking out of the heads of the female guests in attendance. They weren't hats, exactly. I've since found out that these things are called 'Fascinators'. They're all the rage in the UK, Oz and Middle Earth for weddings and posh sporting events.

Do we have them in Canada? I don't remember seeing them. Perhaps in Toronto. Nowhere we'd admit living, anyway.

They're little creations of feathers and sometimes a second element attached to a comb or morphed into the sort of 'mini hat' which Queen Victoria might have yearned for. Who knows - maybe there's a recipe:

Take one songbird, chop coarsely, apply sparingly to head

For those of you who are in the Territorial Army there's this little number in Army/Olive which can double up as sniper's headgear.

This is all occasioned, of course, by Rev'd Ruth's reflections on a recent wedding at St Mark's Portobello where she said that she wanted a Fascinator and wondering what sort of design would be appropriate. Oi! Ruthie! Set the challenge and we shall meet it.

The basic question is - do you want it to go with your cassock and surplice (in which case a black and white number could be found) or with your hair (God has richly blessed you with a rare hue of rich colour not always found upon the heads of clergy) in which case something purple might be more appropriate.

Clergy Conference will soon be upon us. I shall arrive with a selection and you can try them on and model them for us in the pub. Pictures shall be taken and offered to Scottish Episcopal Bloggers at a modest price.