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Today I had my first driving lesson; well, my first in about ten years, since my last abortive attempt to pass my test. It was very weird; I started off remembering almost nothing except something vague about mirrors and trying not to run over cyclists. By the end of two hours I was reasonably comfortable again, not actually getting everything right, but at least not getting everything wrong.

And I like my instructor this time. Last time, back when I was tiny and cars didn’t come in so many shiny colours, I had a middle-aged woman who never really gave me much confidence in myself, which was one of the reasons I failed (that and boxing in a terrified learner who didn’t understand Salisbury’s strange one way system).

So … that seems to be going quite well. Perhaps not as exciting as an intensive course, but then I think enough people I know have done one of them anyway – it’s time for someone to learn properly.

Compline at Girton College Chapel last night featured Rutter’s really rather revolting choral work The Lord Bless You and Keep You. It was my idea – I thought it would be funny.

And it was funny. It was jolly jolly funny. Even the Chaplain was chuckling to himself, and so overcome with the humour of the situation were certain members of the choir that the final chord was singularly lacking a bass note.

Some fifteen hours later and the bloody thing is still going round and round in my head. It has ceased to be funny.

The odd thing is, it keeps turning into A Whiter Shade of Pale.

I think what I just ate could be described as: “a tiny muffin incorporating two rolled up bits of bacon and filled with cream cheese”.

What on EARTH possessed the freelance catering company employed to feed bored Civil Servants to create such an ABOMINATION????

Was the catering company bored? Or did they think the Civil Servants would be bored? Obviously not bored enough, as they didn’t touch the things. Which is why I’ve just had one.

I feel like I’ve been abused by a muffin.

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.

* eating salmon paste sandwiches (which reminds me of my father)
* wishing I was in Norfolk
* avoiding working on puppets
* listening to Dain Bramage Internet radio
* chewing on my pen lid
* happy that Population 3 are going to Edinburgh again this summer

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.