The Universal

Choosing truth

2010-07-08T10:23:00.004+01:00

Sometimes I read something, or think about something, and know that I really want - occasionally even need - to blog it. Why this is blogged rather than journalled I think isn't because I think that my own little thoughts should be instructing and leading others, but more because there's something stake in the groundly about committing something that's true to six billion people (give or take those tribal languages which my blog hasn't quite been translated into yet..) It makes me a. think something through and b. holds me accountable for having believed it rather than being able to shove it out of my head when more it's more convenient.

So firstly, this is some truth:

15 Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation,
16 for through him God created everything
in the heavenly realms and on earth.
He made the things we can see
and the things we can’t see—
such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.
Everything was created through him and for him.
17 He existed before anything else,
and he holds all creation together.
18 Christ is also the head of the church,
which is his body.
He is the beginning,
supreme over all who rise from the dead.
So he is first in everything.
19 For God in all his fullness
was pleased to live in Christ,
20 and through him God reconciled
everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.

This truth is brought to you from Colossians 1. I recognise if anyone happens to read this you will fall into one of two categories. One group of people are people who believe this kind of stuff and therefore possibly saw the first line and scrolled straight down to here as they already know it. The other are people who don't believe it and scrolled down to hear because they think it's poppycock. Whichever side of the fence you fall I would recommend going back over it - cos it's either true or false and nothing can be the same again either way. Anyway, I happen to believe it's true and am one of the people who perhaps just skim read it for this reason. However, what happens next really struck me....

21 This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. 22 Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.

23 But you must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it.

This last bit is the point of this post and bless you for getting here. I think this is an astonishingly important thing for all people regardless of the fence issue - sometimes we need to continue believing truth. I am someone who responds well to affirmation and am fortunate to be in many situations where I continue to be affirmed. Yet it's not a very sustainable way of living. To be dependent on other people's feedback can make day to day life quite up and down.

I equally love and am challenged by the fact though that some things can remain true regardless of how I feel about them. We don't continually look for proof about gravity - we (well, "we") did our research, worked out it was a thing and then got on with doing life around around this principle. But these verses shove this stuff about God under the same umbrella that we'd use for science and whatnot. It's an unchanging, non-dependent, always and forever, Truth. It says that I, as a Christian, don't need to keep being assured by anecdotal or analytic evidence of how God views me. The end results of what he achieved by properly dying and properly coming back to life don't vary. What he did was objectively once and objectively for all - I am always included in the "everything" that he has made peace with. However I'm feeling and whatever my mood this will never change - in exactly the same way that I'm not suddenly going to float up to my ceiling just because I question the basic principles of physics.

I find "standing firm" really quite hard - maybe because I can be so changeable it is difficult to accept the same isn't true of all other things. Yet I'm struck today by the importance of telling myself truth and then living in light of that truth, regardless of feeling and regardless of what others might be or might not be telling me. If more frequently my knees stopped shaking and my mind stopped wavering, I think I might just realise quite how solid the ground beneath me really is.

Clegg and Coxon

2010-05-03T22:31:00.007+01:00

Hello, hello, helloooooo....

I haven't been around these parts recently because I have got Very Into another blog project (ohmydays, how pretentious does that sound?!) Anyway it's called frantakingpictures and, well, it's about me taking pictures. Light relief some might say. Lots of pictures, not many words...the complete antithesis of this! If I were you I would take a quick scroll of how long this post is and if it looks longer than you care for, follow the link. For titillation. *Snigger*

Oooh, I'm in quite a yarning mood. Three quarters of Parklife (Parkli?) went to the Impey for us tea and a beer which were lovely. However JD Weatherspoon spends more money heating his house than we do ours, so the warmest things I can do right now is carry on drinking my rudeboy in the dive-bomb (i.e. knees tucked up under my chin) position at my desk and tap away. Ooh I think I might talk about two things. The election and a brilliant new Blur track. They both excite me, although in quite different ways...

The election: how are we ever going to choose?!

It's almost here! I know some people are, like, enough already and other people are all election smellection, but, SERIOUSLY. We literally don't know who will be our leaders on Friday. There are only three days left of normalness! I know there's the whole thing of "it doesn't matter who wins, the Government will still be in charge..." but genuinely, massive great faults in the electoral system aside: this is our moment. Regardless of how centred the main three (THREE!) might be around the middle, it is us, you and me and my nan and your year eight history teach, who grant legitimacy to one or two (TWO!) of them to take the helm. A frighteningly exciting opportunity. NathanDogg and I went to Geneva over Easter and I was told by some people there that in certain areas they are really in to participatory democracy and every few months they have a referenda on a whole bunch of policies. Apparently it gets boring and people either don't bother or just put random, uninformed crosses in certain boxes but I am fairly certain that I would be a very diligent, if slightly overbearing, participant. The sort of excitement civic duty ignites in me is best contained in five yearly events, I fear. That said if anyone gets jury service and wants to trade....

So in relation to this I have some things to link:

1. Voteforpolicies is brilliant and I would well recommend it if you haven't already been collared into it by some other corner of the Internet. It's a way of assessing your political persuasion based on policy rather than personality. I think I came out 60% Green which was interesting/uninfluential on my decision making. However it was a good way of actually getting informed rather than just riding on the limited knowledge stored up from my first year British Government module.

2. I think how much most of our minds are shaped by the media is really interesting. Cos, ultimately, a lot of the stuff the politicians say doesn't make lots of sense to regular people, so newspapers and television shows and nextdoor neighbours are really good at decoding that and making applicable to us. But, you know, the lost in translation thing means that we're getting a cloaked view of The Truth (which, btw, is why the above link is useful). Two things caught my eye in the last few days....

- One is this Facebook group challenging people not to be reeled in by Rupert Murdoch in the next few days. Obviously mainly a load of hippy students who wouldn't be voting Tory anyway, but a good point made none the less.

- The other is this coming out by the Guardian for the first time. And yeah, it's very easy for me to say I won't be following Murdoch but it's massively more difficult to say the same about this trendy, left wing paper who basically I want to be (albeit apart from being made of paper and being squeezed through one of those printing machines.)

How everyone isn't a floating voter still is beyond me.

Blur are back (back again, Blur's back, tell a friend...)

All together. With Graham! Making all of those beautiful organny bits that have we have been bereft of whilst they made stupid albums like Think Tank. Anyway, there was a thing called Record Store Day apparently and a load of bands made a track just to be purchased in record stores and not on the Evil Interweb. So this is the first song back togeva and I consider it a thing of great beauty. Yes life can be mundane, yes often one day follows a similar pattern to the last, yes Woolworths is no more, but actually: there is something innately beautiful which makes it all have a point. Now I think we might differ on what that is, but heck. It is a really, really good song.

Gwon. You've wasted this much time.

The trouble with bikes..

2010-03-16T16:23:00.003Z

My back hurts. The bottom bit. Not the bottom, bottom bit, but the bit just up from the bottom bit. Let's call it my lower back. It's not eyewateringly painful, or intakeofbreathingly hurty, it's just a bit grumbly. You know how if someone tells you that they have hung out your washing this isn't for information sharing purposes? Cos, you know, it's normally quite apparent without the announcement. However, they tell you just so you know that you've been a little bit annoying. Well, it's sort of like that. I don't normally need my back to tell me it's there. I know this from such things as bending and also my head being about five feet away from my toes. But right now it is choosing to make me slightly more aware of it's presence because it's a little bit cross with me.

"Why pray tell?" I hear you ask. ("Does that point need a paragraph of build up?" I hear you mutter..)

This week I have been cycling. Lots. Mainly downhill, but lots. To college I race, to Alex's I wizz, to church I dash, to Prison View I fly. It's been great. Life is a lot quicker on Esther's wheels and I can be here, there and just about everywhere (so long as it's mainly downhill) in minutes. However, it not being my bicycle and me being a bit of a scaredy cat mean that several things are true:

One. I do not have a helmet.
Two. I do not have lights.

and therefore...

Three. To compensate for this I sometimes ride on the pavement.

But other than being shouted at by both people I know and people I don't know, but do annoy, this has been fine. I was loving my new found freedom and speed. I even managed to balance a bottle of wine on my handlebars on Saturday night. This was surely the good life?

Until my back started to hurt.

You see the damage would seem to have been done not by my lack of accessories but the fact that me and the bike aren't quite the right fit. His seat is a bit low, his handlebars are questionable. I can't work gears. And so whilst we've been getting the job done, actually we've probably been shortening both of our lifespans quite considerably.

I'm about to meet Billie and Jake to go to a student Question Time with Ben Bradshaw et al. so I don't really have time to think this through, but I do find it interesting. I've enjoyed riding the bike. I haven't had any accidents, I haven't run into any trouble. I've been wanting to jump on and do it again and again, thinking that I had found the silver bullet to my troubles.

And yet actually it's been doing me quite a lot of damage that I couldn't see to start with. On the surface it's been solving one problem (lateness) but under the surface it's been creating a much bigger one (potential cripple). It would be interesting to map out how many more of Esther's bikes there are in my life that I'm not noticing the impact of at the minute.

Right, Ben. You're going to vote, yeah? Good.

Sunflowers and strawberries ahead.

2010-03-06T16:57:00.005Z

It is March and there are crocuses(/croci/crocus) and the sun is shining in the morning and the other day I didn't wear a coat one time. Fit as.

A mixture of consumerism and biology means humans aren't given the option of flying south or rolling into a ball for those five cold, dark months between November and March. Life trudges on and so we must too. We go out in the dark and come back in the dark, as they say. I feel less certain in these weeks that my spring has been wound enough to get me through til tea. I think living for sleep is almost exactly the opposite of the life we were intended for and yet in December and January that becomes the goal more often than I would like. We go on, because we're British and that's what we do, but we moan (because we're British and that's what we do.) It can just all be a bit of a hard s l o g.

And then March comes. We regain our synchronicity with the created world and everyone and thing is waking up at the same time. Yes it's chilly but we say "it's bright". Yes it rains but we call them "showers". Everything is just a little bit more cheery. It's like we hadn't realised that we'd had our knuckles clenched during the cold and as we walk outside in Spring they seem to slowly release. Tension we didn't know we were storing is being released back into the ether. It feels a little bit like we are being made new with the flowers and the leaves. Everything is fresh, everything is clear. Everything, as I said, is bright.

I'm not sure if this will quite make sense, but in my head there is quite a beautiful likeness that can be drawn between what's happening under the ground and what's happening above the ground about now. Because under the ground there are bulbs and seeds that are waiting to shoot. They've been planted in anticipation and now they're waiting for their moment. Whilst the gardner who set them knows exactly what is to come, most of the rest of us haven't a clue. And yet despite not knowing where they are or what exactly they will look like we still trust in the good things to come and that there are sunflowers and strawberries ahead.

Which is a little bit like us who tread the soil. My hope is renewed in the sunshine that there is a great big God who knows what will happen and when. He knows the times and the places, He knows where we're going and also how we get there. I don't. Not the foggiest. All I can know is where I am now and from where I have come. Yet, because of this big gardner in the sky, I still have absolute confidence that there are sunflowers and strawberries ahead.

Tueswahey

2010-01-26T14:58:00.004Z

So I think we have established that I blog for my benefit and not any greater good. I have had 67 days of not caring less about this online expression of self and now, just because I feel Convicted, all 6 people who Follow me will be told "Ooh, ooh, ooh, Fran has written something!!"..or similar. Like Colin Firth's character in Love Actually. Sod everyone else whilst he's off falling in love with some Spanish chica and jumping in lakes and stuff but then December rolls around and he feels some tug of obligation to go and do the family thing. Yet he turns up at token imposing central London home on leafy street, has a quick once over the faces of his long lost nieces and nephews and realises he actually quite prefers the Spanish chica. So off he sods again. Bad Uncle Jamie, bad Uncle Jamie. You can see how that's like my relationship with The Universal, yes? No? Hmm, moving on....

I love Tuesday. Wednesday morning to Monday tea time is generally filled with Having To Be In Other Places Decided By Other People. And largely this is a wonderful thing. On the whole I love getting to be a teacher, I heart my church and everything I get to be a part of there, in all the gaps between these things I get to hang out with brilliant people...these are all great and wonderful. But sometimes, just occassionally, it's really great to. Stop.

Maybe what makes Tuesday all the more satisfying is that it is predated by Monday night. A little tradition has started in Parklife which has gained the name Monday Night Review. Monday Night Review is probably our best opportunity of the week to catch up on news and activities, discuss the issues of today, put the world to rights, patch up any wrongs, do an online shop and watch Glee. It's a great thing to do when you live with busy people. The other day Jo and I calculated that we had seen each other for approximately 45 minutes in 4 days. Monday is important to remedy that.

But what this means is that Tuesday gives me the space, I have been thinking, to unfurl. To steal back some time and to make a head start on the week's achievement whilst being able to unpack my head and see if I can fit it back together in a smaller space. When trying to work out if I was an introvert or extrovert the other day, Nathan asked the question (which Esther takes credit for), of whether I get my energy from other people or being alone. I still haven't worked it out. I thrive on busyness but am sustained by stillness. I don't imagine that to be of interest to any other human, but, you know, we have already established that this if this blog was a high street store it's more Primark than Oxfam.

Anyway.

These are the things I think are important right now:

* Toasties. Today's was cheese, tuna and mango chutney. It could have gone either way but it ended up being a WINNER. If anyone did ever read this post and has any other suggestions they are always very gratefully received.

* You should probably try and name Nathan's bicycle whilst the window of opportunity is open to the fresh breeze of creative inspiration.

* The size of our footprints. Like, not the carbon ones (although, you know, important). This is something I have been considering whilst washing up (cough*Esther,Ireallydid*cough). So...I am training to be a teacher. Most days I don't feel very good at this. But I plan and I action and I have reams and reams of paper detailing exactly how I am trying to impart a passion for well placed commas. Yet time and again the 150 minutes is up and I am not sure whether there has been any osmosis whatsoever. In these moments I can feel not so much weightless as faceless. I can believe, for a few seconds I am having zero influance on the world around me. Yet...In other situations I can be completely oblivious as to where my feet are treading and whether or not the people beneath them actually want my brown suede Schuh own brand boots all over them. I can assume I am an island despite the fact that every single lecturer who has ever marked one of my essays will know, no man is. And equally vice versa. Like every potentailly mental person I have a mentor who I meet up with periodically to check in with and she has been a huge source of encouragement and wisdom. Yet in a recent conversation she said she wouldn't consider herself a leader at all and was completely surprised by my appreciation of her. Being a Bible believer I am fully signed up to the potter and clay image of how God shapes us, but I am increasingly aware of his use of third parties in this process. Maybe right now I am simply grateful for the fingerprints and footprints at work in shaping me and want to make sure I am striving for similar good.

* It's almost not winter.

This was good for me. I am little bit too embarrassed, however, to ask you the same :)

Catch up soon. x

Mad props to Joseph

2009-11-10T10:31:00.002Z

Hello. This blog post will be surprising for three reasons;

1. It is a blog post that I am writing. That's very August 2009.
2. It doesn't massively involve me. That's very March 1986 (I don't think I was as self analytic then).
3. It is a little bit Christmassy. That's very December 25th (on a rolling basis).

So. To kind of immediately counter statement number two, I feel like I should give you some context. The context is I am not very good at reading the Bible in a structured way. I have tried many different strategies (as an unstructured person would) but in recent days I have committed to a new approach. I am going to attempt one of those guides which gives you a couple of chapters each day and hopefully you should make your way through the WHOLE THING in one or two or seventeen years. This genuinely excites me a bit right now. It also overwhelms me too, but I'll save that for another day.

Anyway...

Hence being at the beginning of four different stories currently, one of which is the birth of Christ. Really brilliant stuff, you've probably heard a bit about it before. Anyway this morning I was reading chapter two of Matthew which is the bit where the wise men are following the star and King Herod catches drift of some new king in town and isn't best pleased. So annoyed in fact is he that he decides to go on a mad bout of infanticide. Not cool.

So the wise men/royal astrologers continue with their star tracking until they find it above this 'ere stable and the Bible says they "fell down and worshipped him". I think I love the idea that they are deeply exhausted and slightly emotional and probably more than slightly overwhelmed by being guided by a star in the sky to the Messiah. And just all their dignity is completely stripped of them in that moment when they realise they have been taken by God to God; albeit God with skin and hair and tiny finger nails. Anyway, that isn't even why I wanted to write but it is a pretty amazing thing in itself.

So yeah, Joseph. To be honest he's not my best Joseph; the one with the colourful coat I think takes first place in my head. But today I have just been completely impressed by the one with sandpaper and spirit level.

Right. His missus-to-be is chosen by God to bear the saviour of the world. To begin with he doesn't realise this and it's all a bit awkward for a bit where he thinks he's gonna have to quietly give her the elbow and find a wife with slightly more sexual integrity. This however was cleared up when an angel of the Lord appeared to him and gave him the lowdown on not ditching Mary, it all coming about by the spirit, the fact that he should call him Jesus for he will save his people from their sins etc. etc. The Bible then says that when Jospeh wakes up he did what the angel commanded. So going against all logic and rationale Joseph takes God at his word and obeys him.

But that's not even all....

Chapter two is what I was reading today and I just thought what a man. By this point the wise men have gone on their way and Jospeh has another message from an angel in his dream. This time he said "Get up and flee to Egypt with the child and his mother...stay there until I tell you to return because Herod is going to try to kill the child." And then, and I'll paraphrase what happens now, we're told that Jospeh took them both to Egypt that night. So, firstly, Joseph was properly listening to God, secondly, he was entirely obedient and thirdly he just got on and did it. I struggle with all three of these but even if I managed the first two, having the conviction and the trust to go and do it just like that is pretty amazing. And then, finally...

"When Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and told him, "Get up and take the child and his mother back to the land of Israel, because those who are trying to kill the child are dead." So Joseph returned immediately to Israel with Jesus and his mother". (Matt 2:19-22)

This is 2009 years ago roughly. There's no mass media. Joseph can't have this truth verified by another source. He's in flipping Egypt. But he heard God and trusted God and obeyed God. End of.

Thanks for reading. Joseph has challenged me this morning. Yet also he encourages me too. He was a carpenter who kind of assumed the worst on hearing Mary's news first off. And yet that didn't count against him and God placed him at the centre of the Jesus' immediate sphere of impact. I think I might sometimes sideline Joseph as being a supporting cast member rather than one of the main players but it's a relief to know God didn't do the same.

Much Ablog About Nuffing

2009-08-28T22:56:00.002+01:00

Ooh, the 28th of August. Where has the time gone, eh? I can't be entirely sure (without standing up and checking our journal) but I think this time a year ago I was on a plane travelling home from Delhi. My memory of this is based purely on the fact that I think that we read a Saturday paper on the train travelling back to my Mum's house. A year ago. Mental. That was a busy time. If my memory serves me correctly then we landed on the Saturday, went back to mine, slept, woke up on the Sunday and washed clothes and ate and stuff and then moved into Parklife on the Monday and started Contact on the Tuesday. (On the Wednesday we went kayaking and on the Thursday we did a First Aid course. I can't work out what I did on the Friday but as it's 356 days ago maybe you will forgive me.) This is possibly why I am finding these few weeks off so stange, the last time when my day to day wasn't prescribed by a contract or diary or travel guide kind of belongs to a part of my life which I don't remember so well. It's only been a year since I was a student but the separation I feel from the time Before is quite amazing. It's funny that I share the same city as Student Fran, the same church and a lot of the same friends, but everything is very different. Student Fran was a visitor to this fair corner of the world. She was falling in love with it at quite a rate, but she was a temporal part of it nonetheless. Real Fran has her home here. She might not know which night it's cool to go to Arena or what the owner of Mega Kebab is called, but this town is her town. (Well there's probably a few members of Day for Retired who are seventeenth generation Devonian who might disagree, but for the fact that I pay my Council Tax to Exeter City Council I think I count!).

I think this is only going to be a brief post partly because a) I want to carry on reading Red Moon Rising and b) I have to pack to go to my friend Cat's hen party in Birmingham this weekend. But also maybe it will be brief because I'm in quite a thinkative mood at the moment and want my thoughts to be a little bit more collected before I spread them too ill-advisedly over t'internet. I wish I journalled better. I am very aware that quite a significant twelve months of my life has just passed and I think an equally significant twelve months are about to begin. I feel like this is a good time to look back on what God might have been/still be teaching me and work out what I should be taking forward with me, and possibly what I might need to let go of. I think this is a good thing to, however I'm also aware of the difference between reflection and dwelling. The latter isn't always terribly positive for me! We'll see though.

Right, much more banter promised for next time. I'm going out in public in a tutu for goodness sake. Watch out West Midlands.

Communiloving

2009-08-16T17:36:00.005+01:00

I am just coming to the end of three days home alone. It's been strange.

When I arrived back from the Lake District on Thursday (lovely, thank you very much) I was a little bit excited about having the house to myself. Now I should say, as one of my readership of two is my housemate, that I wasn't excited because I don't like my housemates. They're wonderful. And when you're alone, no matter how long you wait, spaghetti bolognese never magically appears in front of you. But the concept of some alone time seemed quite attractive. A good chance to sit and be and think and reflect and go to the loo with the door open seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. I think I thought I would come out of the experience a bigger person. Maybe even a better one.

To be fair I enjoyed it for a bit. Not having to queue to use the laptop/toilet/shower/washing machine/straightners/mirror/stairs/hoover (I joke on the last one) was good novelty value. Choosing to live in mess is quite liberating, tidying things away and them staying away is nothing short of brilliant. And coming and going and not telling anyone where you are makes you feel a little bit Destiny's Child (without being black or having sold 40 million records worldwide). But...it's also a little bit dull.

It's quite a nice thing to appreciate afresh that you really enjoy living with the people that you are contractually obliged to live with. Whilst I have an irrational annoyance towards anyone who might dares turn on the bathroom extractor fan before I'm awake, and I can see anyone who tries to make conversation with me in the morning as setting out to ruin my day/life, and generally no one else will ever match up to the golden standards I set in all other areas of my life, it turns out that for Party Cat to live up to her partying* reputation she needs other people to bounce off of, have jokes, occassionally irritate and generally share life with.

So I'm a little bit scared that this is just the impact of Orange's advertising campaign that I'm just realising I am who I am because of everyone else. I would prefer to think I am much deeper than this. I tried to engage Esther in a conversation earlier which likened my experience of living alone to the age old A Level Philosophy dilemma of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in an empty forest. She didn't give it much time of day, and, to be fair, even apart from my three contemporaries I probably am still real and do exist, but I think I have realised the life part of Parklife is in the community that exists between these walls. Parkexistance is probably a more appropriate description of this weekend. Anyway, everyone (plus an extra) is coming home this evening and I imagine at 7.55 in the morning I will be mentally cursing whichever of them has the weakest bladder, but, right now, I praise God for having placed us all here.

Community is something I could (and do) bang on about for ages, but I think it's how we were created to exist. Not necesarily in the shape that this one does (humanity would die out fairly quickly!), but in various forms of interdependent existance. It just works. I might never be able to wire a plug, drive a car, play a piano or speak Russian, but I'm glad I know people who can.

*Drinking tea and playing Scrabble.

(Marlborough) and (chain letters).

2009-07-13T20:48:00.005+01:00

Ooh, hello, anyone at home? Don't mind me, just dropping in for anicecupofteaandasitdown.

So, blogging didn't really happen in June. Mybad. To catch up, in short, life is really quite good. Nuff said :)

I went away to a quaint, little town called Marlborough this weekend and stayed with my friend Emma and our other friend Jon (and Emma's family and dog and her Mum's friend). We were all drawn to this particular corner of the south west because there was a jazz festival in her town. I thought I was being slightly ambitious in comparing it to the Edinburgh Festival, in that all of the town's pubs and restaurants host live music all weekend and you wander from venue to venue supping pretty cider and having your ears entertained. However, upon reading the Festival's brochure, it seems they compare themselves to SXSW in Texas. I would agree if SXSW's key demographic was John McCririck. I don't think it is.

Anyway it was really good fun. It was nice to go away and be with people who are really good friends and not have the pressure to, like, chat and stuff. We saw loads of music, bumped into Bradley from Eastenders, befriended the dog of a former member of Fairport Convention, ate and drank, was merry, slept in a giant bed (singularly), and just generally switched off a bit. Was wonderful. Don't get me wrong, we went for free I did feel free to judge the cash paying punters, but it was cool anyway.

You know what Jo just reminded me of? Chain letters!! That is retro cool. Jo was saying they made her very upset and she remembers crying to her Mum under the pressure, whereas I think my Mum was particularly anti the chain letter movement, so mine were always a covert thing. But, yeah, brilliant! And the ones with the chocolate bars! Like an early form of those pyramid schemes that GMTV always warn you against. Anyway, I have nothing left to add to this, just something I had forgotten about.

These people were so good we saw them twice. See you soon. x

Half term high jinks

2009-05-27T16:09:00.002+01:00

It's half term!! Woooooo!! Now, that's not to mean that I don't love regular life and stuff, but I'm not sure I will ever grow out of that half term feeling. And, as I see it, if full grown teachers are allowed to be as excited as the yoofs in Radi8 then I'm pretty sure I must be allowed to join in the fun too. Someone almost tried to throw a spanner in my works (metaphorically speaking) the other day by asking what I was doing over half term. Uh-oh, I don't like wasting time and apparently everyone else is going on trips and visiting people...does the fact that I am not booked on lots of advanced single trips around Britain mean that in fact this time is meaningless and wasted and won't have any significant impact on this transitional decade of my life?!

No, it doesn't.

I rather impressed myself by being able to say I was actually just staying around Exeter because, get this, it means I get to be in Devon. In Devon! Imagine having a life where you get to live in Devon?! Well, maybe you don't have to imagine, or maybe you're quite happy just where you are thank you very much, but I, for one, today, am very, very happy and grateful for abiding somewhere quite this wonderful. Even if it is raining...

I was excited by my afternoon off today and all the possibilities of working through my Half Term To Do List Special, but it's not been terribly successful thus far. Lunch, tick. Book hair cut, no one is picking up the phone. Book dentist appointment, call disconnected (x3). Order wedding present for Hannah and Chris, mygiftregistry.com is cretinous. Tidy bedroom, have better idea of throwing away "half my clothes"..so far this has involved making a pile of them in the middle of my bedroom floor, getting slightly overwhelmed and retreating to the living room.

And so I blog. Whilst this didn't make the official list I was inspired to write a little when I whiled away a good 20 minutes at work this morning on Lauren's new blog. I really like it. If you're wondering what other blogs I quite like then take a gander on the side of this page somewhere. All top quality stuff.

As I should really get back to the list I am just going to leave you with a clutch of really quite good things that I have appreciated recently....

A clutch of really quite good things that I have appreciated recently

* Walking and the sun and Topsham and cake. All of these things individually are fairly up there (where?) on my list of examples of good things in life but when combined into one that's quite a dangerously exciting combination.

* Tunnock's bars. I have a circular relationship with these chocolate bars that I ADORE them and then manage to forget they exist and then stumble across them again and am convinced that they are even more brilliant than the last time I ate them. Possibly I just have a poor memory. Possibly.

* Finding out that only two men in the world know the speical recipe for Irn Bru and that so top secret is this classified information that they are unable to both travel in a plane together at the same time. Brilliant.

* Ben Folds. I have been enjoying a BF renaissance in the past week, both home and away, and he has made me happy. Like remembering an old friend. Listen.

I am going to tackle the clothing issue. I hope to win but please don't hold me to account on the 50% statement. Always a visionary, not always a realist.

Salutations.

2009-05-13T18:16:00.008+01:00

Cor and blimey. It's been a very long time since I've writ anything here. Not that I suspect anyone cares, but a tad lazy on my part. That said, I think I've commented before that I tend to write more when I have some kind of emotional knot that needs some kind of release. That hasn't happened recently. The good ship is sailing quite happily on the Ally Ally O.

Since my last splurge I have been offered a place to do a PGCE in further education at Exeter College in September. This is ace. A year of learning how to work with grown ups to teach them how to make the most of reading and writing. It a little bit seems to be the best possible thing that I could be given the opportunity to do with my time and it reminds me that in all things God is there working for the good. Sometimes I find myself thinking that I have had my fair share of good living and that I should expect imminent rubbishness, but I've been realising in the past months that just isn't true. I'm not promised that life will be a constant picnic but actually all this blessing stuff isn't a conincidence, and I'm not using up my magic wishes, He just is good. So, yeah, Amen to that.

Right, teatime. Esther is bringing home panini tonight. Did you know there's no such thing as 'paninis'? Nope. Panini is in fact the plural and a single item should be referred to as a panino. Every day's a school day.

Finally, Squeeze have been important today. Lend them your ears.

Merry Easter

2009-04-12T21:06:00.003+01:00

Shalom! It's funny, this year is the only ever year of my life thus far where I have worked for a church, and yet this year I feel like Easter crept up on me more than any other. You would think, being in the resurrection business and all that, I would have been more prepared. But no. Maybe I'm just out of the loop but I just feel like more than other recent years it's been less of a hype. I was trying to work out today whether a) this is true or false, b) whether it's just because I'm not 4 and my parents don't feel the need to dress up as large chocolate bearing animals or c) whether it just reflects people generally being a bit distracted with life. I didn't conclude upon any of these points (well, apart from b, which I think is definitly true) but it did make me realise that it's pretty cool that however much I might be an eventist and not having an egg hunt round my garden and a bonnet making contest and a stations of the cross and 15 gamillion creme eggs might make me slightly dissappointed it's also pretty cool that every day is kind of Easter Day. Not just because Esther brings home hot cross buns on a daily basis, but because Jesus is the reason for the season. And He is risen. Not just today, but tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow. And, despite the whole Good Friday thing, even yesterday and yesterday's yesterday. Yesterday, today, forevermore. That's pretty cool. Even if they don't give you chocolate on Cathedral Green every day to remember it by.

So..what else. We had fun in France visiting Ross. There's a fairly select(elite?) group in the UK that recognise his coolness, but I feel like the whole of France is Ross keen. This obviously makes me want to start the official backlash, but we had a good time eating and drinking Frenchstyle, pottering around, having balloon animals made etc etc. It was a good break in the way that I felt in the middle of it refreshed and like I was having a good time, but also like I would quite like to go home and get on with that life too. Generally made me feel excited by things again.

The Simple Life is offically done as of this morning and the ending of Lent. I'm not quite what I would conclude from it. I think I thought it would be easier than it was. Not that I found myself having to be pulled off of H and M window fronts or owt, but just I really wanted stuff. And not in the, "Oh dear my flip flops are falling apart" type way (which they are), but in the most ugly, covetous, "Ooh my life would be so much better if I just had more....stuff" type way. Doing the charidee shop thing quite a lot I think I thought that maybe I might be above all that material greed thing, but, I realised, I'm not at all. I'm not sure what that means now though. I definately learned I don't need to buy packaged sandwiches, and that's a good thing I can continue not doing, but I do want to continue to muse upon the needing stuff thing.

Right, I was supposed to be getting down with the parents and watching Lewis but I have failed miserably by writing this instead, so I should drop in for the last few minutes. Merry Easter everyone...

Cheers and Boos

2009-03-30T17:49:00.000+01:00

Cheers and Boos used to be a very, very important part of my life. My youth group (which may well have been The Coolest Youth Group In The World Ever) met on a Sunday night, we were in fact the imaginatively named Sunday Night Group, and amongst many other important things involving lard, jelly and the Lord Jesus Christ, we celebrated, commiserated and generally put the world to rights through cheering and booing through one another's lives. Here are mine today.

Cheers

Getting ready to go on holiday to France on Friday. Est, Rach and I are taking an aeroplane at Early O'Clock from Southampton and we are going to Ross town for a few days. I'm in the habit of being a bit blaise about holidays (having been fortunate enough to have done quite a few of them), but this one I'm really excited about. I'm not sure if it's because I'm looking forward to seeing Ross, or if it's because real life can be a bit mundane sometimes. I'm gonna tell him it's the former.

Googling. My actual job is fairly dull. It is data inputting, it is filing, it is spreadsheets, it is moving files, it is redirecting phonecalls, it is being told off for having crap posture. Fortunatly my colleagues have realised this of late and have given me the extra special job of googlin' questions they have. I have a piece of paper taped to my desk and they write stuff on it and I reserach it and give a small presentation on the subject. This has enriched my knowledge in the last few weeks on subjects as varied as Snow White, viaducts, concertinas, large bumble bees, pencils, Luke Perry and the cast of Dallas. Every day's a school day.

Exeter. This sounds barrel scraping, but it's sunny. Exeter in the sun is fricking brilliant, and life is just better. It means you can go to the Quay and the Cathedral and Weigh and Save....just better and more beautiful and just generally more full of wonder. And I can wear flip flops and it doesn't look too strange.

Boos

Getting up in the middle of the night to go to France. I don't want to do anything, ever, when it affects my sleeping pattern. I literally think the world might end.

Feeling a bit end of termed out. As much as I might pretend to be all grown up now, I think that I still only function properly in 10 week spurts (preferably with "reading week" thrown in the middle). Everything is fine but I feel slightly like I'm running on empty. A break will be good.

Not everyone has such as easy and enjoyable a life as me. This makes me a bit sad sometimes.

That was fun. Now, I need to revise for my New Testament exam on Thursday quite badly. If the exam is just on the first three chapters of Mark then I think it's fair to say I will probably kick quite a lot of arse. If it, in any way, broaches any of the rest of the NT, I think it is fair to say at this precise time I shall be a little bit troubled. Still, there's always a chance...

Home Alone

2009-03-09T16:57:00.000Z

Hello. This literally only happens when I am home alone, I reckon there could be a scientifically measured relationship between the frequency of my blogging and the sociability of my housemates. As soon as I have paid off my student loan I may well fund the research myself. Watch This Space. (I have just realised that by the time I have paid off my loan it will be the year 2065 and the others might have moved on a bit by then...).

I havent worked out if I am only meant to do this when I have a Point or not. And I am only really driven to write when I have some kind of emotion which feels like it needs to outburst, but this does not necessarily reflect the status quo of my life. http://www.davegorman.com/ is very important to me. Dave blogs a lot. He is both my blogging and vegetarian role model. He always seems quite happy in his blog, but my knowledge of his (fairly public) borderline personality disorder thing suggests that this probably isn't always the case. So is there some kind of blogging etiquette I need to find out about?? Hm, an example of the very unimportant things which plague my mind.

This means a lot to me...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dxf6keoYV0

New news. The Simple Life.

2009-02-28T19:19:00.000Z

When did Come Dine With Me get so big? When did it stop being in the Richard and Judy have gone on holiday slot at tea time (if you live in East Northants) and become the most important thing that could ever happen to television and something that *even* Top Trumps the Friends/Scrubs trade off?! When, I wonder, when. I say this because I am watching it now. (Instead of Scrubs).

Last year Esther and I gave up meat for Lent. Easily one of the most challenging but rewarding personal experiences of my 23 or so years. I have no will power (hence having to take on the challenge in a tag team) but we did it. Give or take a bacon and brie panini. So this year I felt a bit of a burden to out-do that experience, or at least meet it. The result of this has been a commitment to The Simple Life. This seemed a fairly simple concept in my (and my faithful friend's) head/s. Give up the things in life which are comfortable for a few weeks. Easy..well, it seemed so.

With the meat thing it was fairly easy to discern what was allowed and what wasn't. If looked delicious and like it formerly lived in a farmyard, we couldn't eat it. If it was brown and soggy, we probably could. But this thing involves giving up stuff that aren't necessary. It means not buying snacks from Oasis at work. Done. It involves not checking internet on my phone. Tick. It means only eating, drinking and buying the things that I really need. Hard. So it's been 4 days and I have eaten and drunk out every day. Forsaking one drink and a couple of fruit scones does not equate to living simply, it's just a little bit of a joke. Now, it doesn't matter that I haven't met the rules, they are simply put in place for the sake of a personal challenge, but it makes me a bit sad about how much comfort cushions my life. I have money so I spend it. I have time so I burn it. Now I know I should be grateful not to be in need - I am - but I don't want to become numb to the reality of it.

So I'm not really sure the point of this challenge at the moment but I hope that there might be one. It would be easier if it were more absolute and measurable, but I hope that there might be some benfit from keeping vague. If I'm not counting it in terms of BTP trips missed then it might make me dwell more on the why rather than that what. I think it's about being able to recognise what real need is. And I do know what need is. I've lived among it in Calcutta for a few months. Not enough food, not enough shelter, not enough love...that's need. But all of these things exist in abundance in my life in Exeter and so I think I live in real danger of forgetting what to live in plenty means, and just to accept my ridiculously comfortable life as being normal. Now, nothing of what I might give up would ever even dare to be a comparable experience to living in such extreme destitution as what I have mentioned. So that cannot be the point of it. But my experience of living amongst physical need has been spiritual richness. I have at times tried to convince myself the God of Calcuuta is more real than the one of Exeter. But this is just so, so, so not true. But there is less stuff getting in the way of hanging out with Him there, I make less obsticles for myself, I rely on Him before Dominoes. (Actually, not entirely true. Dominoes tastes pretty flippin good there too, but *slightly* less readily available). So maybe that is the point just there. Not that this tiny attempt at living more simply might genuinely convince me that I am in geographical Calcutta, but that through seeking God before stuff, on some occassions, might help me refind my own personal Calcutta..with Jesus, in 73 Park Road.

That said, I'm off out for a curry now. It's a learning curve....

Old news. Literally.

2009-02-07T10:18:00.000Z

For the benefit of my readership of Esther and Nathan, this is the much famed drafted but not published, now ridiculously out of date and completely unfinished blog entry of two weeks ago. I would delete it, but there might be someone out there somewhere who didnt live through the tooth incident, and I wouldn't want to lose out on any belated sympathy....

I have had a tooth ache for the past few days. I woke up this morning feeling horrible with it (to the point that I was sucking frozen peas in an attempt to ease the pain..comes slightly recommended!). Anyway, then I went to visit the nice Indian men with the shop up the street and asked them for some Ibruprofin and mouthwash (whilst refusing to move my jaw to speak...I think I may have looked slightly like a grumpy ventriloquist (without a puppet)). They obliged, I came home, swilled and swallowed, cried, and then decided that maybe I should attempt to acheive something today! So my hair is busy dying some potentially horrific shade of red and I thought I would blog a little. But it's only when I sat down to write that I realised that A) my mouth wasn't hurting very much at the moment and B) such has been my obsession with mouth pain in the past three days that I literally have forgotten how to think about anything else!

It's been snow week this week! Except it hasn't made me feel very !, it's just made me feel a bit old and grumpy. Slipping and sliding and having wet shoes and socks and rising damp all the flippin time...I hope it's just been that I have been too busy for snow fun rather than me just having died a little inside. Est and I did go to the quay on Tuesday with a friend's daughter who was off school, which was fun, but I just found myself saying dont touch the snow/take off your coat inside or you wont feel the benfit outside/it probably will be gone tomorrow and you can go back to school etc etc. and just sounding Old! Not cool.

10 minutes thinking time

2009-01-18T19:09:00.000Z

I fully intended that I would have updated this before now, but it hasnt happened. I want to say I havent had time but that's just not true. I just haven't made time to do it. The other day I decided it would be really helpful if life came with ten minutes thinking time before each activity to think it through properly, like in exams. The trouble is though, yet again, that there are millions of ten minutes I could choose to take but I choose not to spend it thinking. I choose to spend it chasing demons, working out how he did meet their mother and removing slats from beds. These things do enrich my life on the minute by minute basis but potentially the bigger picture might be slightly more composed if I thought it through better. Ach.

Things are sehr gut at the moment. I feel like before Christmas I had wound myself in a big knot of stress and emotion and stupidness that I could never quite unwind myself from. I'm not really sure why it started, but it was a bit troublesome. Anyway, after considering several different options to make things better (on a sliding scale of scariness) I did as a last resort decide to pray a bit. Someone at church today said that the more you pray about things the more coincidences you seem to start seeing happen...and when you stop, they stop too. Well, to my great benefit, I have been the lucky recipricant of some of these conincidences of late. My situations and pace of life havent altered but my head feels a bit more sorted about it all. Which is cool, whatever you might attribute it to...

In other news...I have had my hair cut slightly too short...I'm considering doing some kind of teaching type qualification next year, maybe in further education...I won Absolute Balderdash today...We might move house in the next month...I realllllly want to go on holiday (which may or may not be massively influanced by watching Slumdog Millionaire this week, brillaint)...Our lovely uni friend Ellie has stayed for the weekend and we had super fun hanging out.

Babble over. Watch Slumdog. x

Beginnings.

2009-01-05T20:47:00.000Z

I've wanted to blog for a while now but I haven't because I've been scared. I've been scared that A) I wouldn't have anything interesting enough to write about, B) I would create some kind of wierd cyber Fran that would pretend to be a lot cooler than the real thing and C) That it's just a really arrogant thing to do. I think I still hold on to all three of these things as legitimate worries, but I might just risk it. This is the kind of dangerous thing that happens when I'm home alone (a previous example being my disasterous, albeit accidental, hair bleaching).

However, I think this has good potential. Firstly, I spend a lot of time in Devon (being where I live and all) and a lot of my most brilliant friends don't live here, so it's a good way of touching base with far flung places like East Northants. Secondly, I don't think my life is that interesting, but I do think it's quite compartmentalised so it would be good to share it in a balanced way. Thirdly (and lastly) some days I have thoughts. Some, I happen to think, could be the beginnings of radical social revolution, others, sadly, might just simply be stupid. Whilst I'm not suggesting that they're of any wider interest, I think I might benefit from writing them down.

So yeah, that's about it. It's 5th January 2009, I am 23, I live in Exeter, I graduated with a degree in International Relations in the summer, I have no idea how I will use this degree, I live with three lovely people in a house we like to call Parklife, I spend 21 hours a week doing various forms of admin at the RD&E hospital, I spend 20ish hours a week working for my church, Belmont Chapel, I like scrabble and travel, I love Jesus and people, I have started writing a blog.

Exciting times. x