I just made a passing reference to the song ‘I’m Every Woman’ (which has been rather in my head of late) and one of my colleagues said “Is that really what it’s called?”
“Yes,” I assurred her.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought it was ‘Climb Every Woman…'”
I was momentarily confronted by a glorious parallel universe in which that is the advice given by the Mother Superior to Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.
Having successfully used my influence to push the sniffer bees through the funding process at work, I have launched a new campaign.
“Whilst there are many guitar players, possessing the full range of competences, there are many more people who wish they could play the instrument but realise they lack the skills, motivation, self-discipline or time to learn it. Of these people, a substantial number play what is known as an “air guitar”; that is to say an imaginary instrument that they pretend to play in synchronisation with some recorded music.
“This device falls between the air guitar and a real guitar in that it is a real, physical device and looks like an instrument but is in fact a computer peripheral…”
Oh, peeerrrrlease!
Let the battle to stop any trace of funding go in the direction of Polaris Instruments’ “Foam Guitar” commence!
They will not be protected by anyone, because there is no Patron Saint of giant foam toys for talentless adults.
For those of you who have been taking an interest in the sniffer bees previously mentioned in this very weblog, it is my pleasure and delight to be able to say that the sniffer bees have been granted funding.
I’m just off to the pub for a celebratory pint. Perhaps when you drink to St George today you’ll raise a glass to the bees as well – because actually St George didn’t kill a dragon at all, that was the Archangel Michael, whereas sniffer bees really DO sniff out drugs and bombs at airports. (No doubt they are aided by Saint Ambrose of Milan, the Patron Saint of bees.)
Andrew Ormerod pointed out to me the other day that my glasses completely change the way I look because they cover up the distinctive rounded smoothness of my cheekbones.
“Cheekbones,” he sagely observed, “are very important.”
I went to see Rowan Williams on Tuesday afternoon. He delivered a talk on the subject of Resurrection, then fielded an hour’s worth of questions. Everything he had to say was wise and relevant, and presented with clarity and humility. In short, he was hugely impressive.
But it has been drawn to my attention that The Times, that bastion of broadsheet tabloidism, was considerably less impressed. Yesterday’s editorial (or “evil Murdoch shite” as the person who pointed it out to me would have it) suggests that the Archbishop’s dabbling in current affairs earlier the same day was a disastrous, inappropriate and incomprehensible mess. Indeed, the man I was so impressed by was actually, according to The Times, talking “gobbledegook”. Admittedly, the “unfortunate sermon” referred to by the editorial is a different one to that which I sat through, and it’s possible that Williams just wasn’t on form earlier in the day. So I popped onto his website and had a butcher’s at the offending address.
Imagine my surprise on reading something which bears little resemblance to the sermon The Times editorial appears to be on about. (Oh, alright – it wasn’t a surprise at all.) This “not particularly coherent attempt” is hardly one of Williams’ more complex or verbose efforts, and since he was addressing a crowd at one of the greatest centres of academia in the world I think he can be excused a certain level of intellectual depth anyway. Of course, intellectual musings of this nature can be taken out of context to look meaningless, hence the quotations in The Times editorial backing up the claim that Williams was talking “gobbledegook”, but read as a whole the sermon ought to make sense to any vaguely intelligent and thoughtful human being.
Of course, “vaguely intelligent”, “thoughtful” and “human being” are not terms one would usually apply to Rupert Murdoch, hence his obvious problems understanding the sermon. And there are other signs that he hasn’t actually understood it or even read the whole thing through; where he wants us to believe that Rowan Williams is making random, misguided statements about a political situation which he doesn’t really understand (he isn’t very clever after all), the actual sermon is tightly focussed on the theme of obedience and the difficulties for Christians looking up to authority when a regime is doing things like invading whole countries on false grounds. (If, in passing, Williams wished to take a swipe at the war he opposed from the very beginning, who can blame him? Though it should be pointed out that, contrary to what The Times editorial suggests, he didn’t once use the words “Iraq”, “Blair”, “Saddam”, “weapons of mass destruction” or “deceitful lying hypocrite”. Furthermore Williams clearly has a far more all-encompassing view of politics and social justice than a single-minded dislike for one war.)
The difficulty of how to respond to our Government at this time is a real issue for Christians and non-Christians alike, and as such I would rather think it comes within the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remit – so how he could be “trivialising his office” by talking about it I’m not sure. Perhaps Murdoch is worried that if the church starts responding to politics in this way it will threaten his role as the man who decides what people think. Or perhaps he’s just cross that he couldn’t understand it.
I don’t know if anybody else listened to the morning service on Radio 4 last Sunday – I think it’s probably unlikely. I think it’s probably unlikely that anybody ever listens to the morning service on Radio 4 on Sunday, unless the clocks have moved back and they think they’ve set their radio alarm for The Archers omnibus.
But it’s really a very good idea, because you see what it is, is church for people who can’t be bothered to get out of bed. Every Sunday, Radio 4 faithfully broadcasts every hideous detail of some church service, usually from somewhere with a very hideous choir and a preacher with an incomprehensible accent. (I was on it myself once, actually, playing the violin in Shine, Jesus, Shine – but that was back in the early nineties, when such things happened all the time I’m told.)
I mention last Sunday’s, because it failed to deliver what I would usually expect from the morning service. Instead of the usual frightfully amusing (or at least amusingly frightful) church service, what we got was the Rev. Dr. John Stott sitting on a cliff in Wales talking about birds, punctuated by recordings from the BBC’s “most unashamedly outrageous hymn arrangements ever” archive. How Great Thou Art as interpreted by Rogers and Hammerstein after a night out binge-drinking.
John Stott, we were assured, is a keen bird-watcher. This much was evident from the fact that he felt it was worth delivering a long, four-part sermon on his feathered friends. On national radio.
Actually, calling it a sermon is rather generous; this was frankly a bird enthusiast talking about his obsession, and pearls of wisdom such as “…and we all need a spiritual homing device” did nothing to conceal that. I mean, please – what next, “we all need a spiritual beak”? “We should all be, spiritually at least, flying around Trafalgar Square and shitting on tourists”?
Is this what I stayed in bed for? Is this any alternative to church? If that’s what it was supposed to be then I can’t see it catching on – it will take more than a few gay clergy to uproot Anglicans from their comfortable pews and make them sit shivering on a cliff top each Sunday morning to listen to camp hymn arrangements and bird watching enthusiasts.
Even Methodism’s better than that.
It is a delight to announce that The Uncertainty Division feature (albeit briefly) on a DVD of Edinburgh Fringe highlights, The Cut of the Fringe, to be released in May 2004.
The cast of Out of Your Mind feature in three places: track 3, “Royal Smiles”, contains three seconds on Andrew Pontzen shouting “But we don’t know who put it there!” at the top of his voice from the top of a stepladder; track 14, “High Flyers”, features a whole seven seconds of James Lark trying to give a flyer to a foreign couple before they turn away disinterested; and track 17, “Fringe Benefits”, has a fleeting glimpse of Andrew Ormerod in hot pursuit of Laura Stewart. (Sadly, James Aylett doesn’t appear to feature anywhere on the DVD at all.)
If the DVD is successful, a special double-disc release is planned for later this year; it is hoped that this might include a whole show from Out of Your Mind, although slightly disappointingly the show the DVD company have chosen is the one James Aylett joins the woman’s army, arguably not one of our finest.
More details are available at http://www.cutofthefringe.ap.fls.org
It is so easy to get distracted on a sunny day. I have been being distracted all day by thoughts of running in fields like Julie Andrews, or winging through the air like a bird.
But the biggest and most surprising distraction was Andrew J. Wood, a man who wants money from my office. At first I was drawn to his website out of a curiosity as to how kitchen worktops can be described as Ecclesiastical Stonemasonary. Even in a Vicarage, it would be pushing the definition.
But on inspecting his website and the history of his business I became more intrigued by the question of what exactly Cyril Wood thought he was doing in 1922 when he became a Stone Mason. With a name like Wood you surely become a carpenter – you’re just making life difficult if you go against the grain (pun intended). Was there a reason for the decision to pursue stone? Was he being deliberately perverse? Perhaps he was fighting willfully against a lifetime of people telling him, “so, I suppose you’ll be going into carpentry, Master Wood!”
Maybe Cyril Wood might have enjoyed the film I went to see last night, which was about somebody else fighting against a life of carpentry, who went terribly off the rails and ended up getting horribly beaten up. I went to see it because it was an 18 and had the word “Passion” in the title, so I thought it would have lots of sex in it, only as it turned out it didn’t have very much sex in it at all.
Talk To Rex 