Witnessed a very humourous exchange between a project student and his supervisor yesterday…

End of a 45 minute project meeting.

Supervisor: So, do you think you ought to make some notes?

Student: No, I’ll remember everything we talked about.

Supervisor: Tell you what – you humour me by writing down what we agreed.

Student: OK.

Student finds a scrap of paper from bag, and then hesitates, pen poised.

Student: What did we agree again?

So the exciting news is that I’ve been recommended for training for ordination in the

Church of England. It is probably possible to deduce this from the last few entries, but I didn’t want to come out with it until our friends, families and work-places had been told!

If all goes to plan I’ll start vicar factory in September, train for a couple of years, and then get revved up!

I don’t take it lightly – this is a process that first niggled over 10 years ago, and that we’ve been explicitly persuing for the last 3 or 4 years, and getting that phone call was such a relief. The Christian faith is so full of paradox – I was absolutely certain of God’s calling, yet also doubted I’d got it right.

So the phone call came on route to Trinity College, Bristol, which was a fabulous place, and I’m back for an interview there at the start of March, and if that goes well we’re moving to Bristol in August/September.

So it’s all very Alanis – I’m sad but I’m happy, baby! Very sad to be leaving Yorkshire, but very happy to be starting training. Sad to be leaving all our friends, but happy to be mocing nearer to family.

Anyway, I thought I might record my thoughts and experiences of being an Anglican ordinand here…

Well, it arrived – as I was halfway along the M42, as it happens!

It was excellent news, which I am greatly looking forward to writing all about in the not too distant future. But not tonight.

I’m expecting an important phone call in the next 24 hours or so, but I don’t know exactly when it’s going to come. I’d forgotten what the anticipation of waiting for a phone call is like – I remember when A. and I were courting, and for about half an hour before the time we agreed to talk I’d be pacing up and down, making sure the phone was still working, all those sorts of things.

You have that sort of nagging sensation at the back of your mind that it might have rung while you were upstairs, or had to pop out, or were doing the washing-up, or whatever. So you check the Call List on the phone, perhaps do a 1471. Then you realised that while on the phone to 1471 they might have been trying to call, so you quickly hang up.

E-mail isn’t actually much better, as it is well known that e-mails can disappear without a trace, or be delayed for days and days. I don’t know how many test messages I’ve sent to myself just to give me peace of mind that e-mails are getting through. But of course it’s a partially meaningless test, as it only really shows that you are capable of sending an e-mail to yourself; it doesn’t say anything about the e-mail route from the sender on whom you are waiting.

One of the nice things about our courting period is that we had two phone-lines in our flat (we had ISDN), and as I was paying for it I snaffled the second line for myself, and the only person who had that number was the future missus. Mind you, there were one or two amusing occasions when someone had dialled a wrong number and I answered saying “hello honey. kiss kiss kiss kiss.” I suppose that’s one of the nice things about caller display, in that you know who is calling (or at least can make a reasonable guess based on the number).

One of those online quizzes has been doing the rounds at work – the ones with numbers and letters where each letter stands for a word, so you have

24 H in a D = 24 Hours in a Day

Well, you get the picture. Anyway, there’s two parts to the quiz; the first part is easier, but has a North American bias, while the second part is a lot harder, but this time just has a Western bias.

Anyway, we have finished both now – bit of a joint effort and some recourse to Wikipedia needed at the very end

I’ve been spending the last few days with some other church-y folk, and one of the things that we generally agreed upon was how important food is in the C of E. I have always found that eating together is one of the best ways to relax together and get to know people, and it’s an important scriptural principle – we see it in the Old Testament, the practice of Jesus and the disciples, and of course in our central act of worship. Certainly one of my golden rules is that if you’re holding a meeting of any significant length, it always helps to provide nibbles to some degree or another.

But I do wonder if we might be taking a bit far. For instance, the lastest report on the situation with women bishops is to recommend Transferred Episcopal Arrangements, or TEA. This in itself is not too bad, until you consider that the process by which the Church of England assesses potential future ministers is called a Bishops’ Advisory Panel on Selection, or BAPS. I’m sure with a little bit of thought we could have ended up with TEA and CAKES instead of TEA and BAPS – the ‘K’ is a bit tricky (as I don’t suppose “Kommission” would be allowed).

Oh, I know – Clergy Of the Future’s Final Episcopal Evaluation. TEA or COFFEE, anyone?

What a fab movie – M. Night Shyamalan right back on form! I really enjoyed The Sixth Sense (and no, I didn’t see it coming). Unbreakable I could take or leave, certainly an interesting concept. Signs left me pretty cold. The Village is another matter altogether, and I loved it!

The film is set in the 1850s, and follows the fortune of a group of people living in a village surrounded by woodland. In the woodlands dwell “Those We Don’t Speak Of” – creatures with whom the villagers have an uneasy truce. The villagers don’t go into the woods, the creatures don’t go into the village. This truce has held for many years, until, one night… It would be wrong to suggest that this film is about the creatures though – it is actually very much about the people who live in the village, there life and love, fears and hopes. And the woods and the creatures lurk as a background menace, threatening if the boundaries are ever crossed.

The other key concept in the film is colour – the safe colour and the bad colour. Which is interesting as one of the main characters is actually blind.

I managed to stop myself trying to antipcate The M Night Shyamalan Twist ™, which to be honest wasn’t too hard to spot, and I think would have spoilt my enjoyment of the film. Unlike The Sixth Sense, your whole understanding of the film doesn’t change in the light of the various revalations we see as the film goes on, and in that respect you’re much better off just enjoying the characters and story unfold. But it is food for thought, especially some of the difficult choices that the Elders have to make in the governance of the village.

For me it didn’t lose anything on DVD at all, definitely worth watching.

I’m very upset that so few people appeared to have watched Bleak House. Apart from being Dickens on the BBC (which makes it worth watching before considering anything else), it was actually really good. Star studded cast, great acting and directing (although I’m not at all sure about the whoosy cuts at the change of scenes).

But by far the best bit, in my opinion, was the horribly odious and despicable Smallweed (played to perfection by Phil Davis), who was confined to a chair on poles by some infirmity, and besides from moaning about his bones would perioidically shout “Shake me up Judy” (in order to help his bones, apparantly). Judy being his grand-daughter, by the way.

This really is a fabulous catchphrase, and brings a smile to my face everytime I think of it – but nobody else has a clue if I suddenly come up with “Shake me up Judy”. It’s a hard knock life, eh?

Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse, was a book I was really looking forward to reading. I was hooked by The Davinci Code (even if it annoyed me by being utter drival from a factual point of view), and was under the impression Labyrinth was going to be even better. In this regard I have to confess I was a little disappointed.
Now don’t get me wrong – I enoyed reading it, and the missus will testify that I had my nose stuck deep into it. But somehow the language wasn’t as engaging, I found it quite confusing and hard to follow in places, and there was a certain degree of deus ex machina, I thought anyway.

The basic premise is of two girls calls Alice (or equivalent), seperated in time by some 800 years, who are both caught up in the mystery of the grail, somehow. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that there is a strong suggestion that one is the re-incarnation of the other, and the book proceeds with their lives sort of following a parallel track, albeit 8 centuries apart.

I got a very strong impression that all the C12 characters had C21 equivalents (Alice and Alais being the two most obvious), but it wasn’t at all clear to me who mapped onto who. And while it was very obvious who the “bad guys” are, their motivation and “side” was never very clear. I suppose I felt like I was being left to do a little bit too much work trying to piece the puzzle together – and indeed I think I failed.

Still, it was a good old yarn, and very absorbing – once you stopped worrying about the metaphysical and spiritual aspects, it was actually quite enjoyable. Not a classic by any means, but certainly a page-turner, and I suspect if you were more familar with that region of France the book would feel like a cross between an old friend and a tour guide!

Got next week off. I do enjoy my work, but I also really like having time off. As it is I’m away for the the first few days, in Stoke of all places, but am looking forward to just kicking back on Thursday and Friday.

The theoretical plan is that I start work on the study, which is in need of some attention. We think we will be able to re-decorate and make it presentable without having to move everything out, which would obviously be a bonus. There’s not too much to do – there is an old gas flue to fill in, but otherwise it’s mainly a case of painting. The heart-sink part is that I don’t think we can realistically avoid taking the shelves off the wall, which in itself isn’t a problem, except that they are all covered in books. Sigh.

Actually I’m not particularly expecting to get any painting done – I’ll be happy if the room is prepped for painting, and then we can slap it on over a couple of weekends.