Gossypium.co.uk have updated their range. I got a new catalogue in the post yesterday. It’s a huge improvement over the old one, and there’s a hoody that I’m really quite tempted by. There still don’t seem to seem to be such things as ethical socks or trousers, and their web site still makes the number one mistake of web design, but it’s a good start.

I had some really great news yesterday. I got a letter in the morning post telling me I had been offered a place on the Transform:City programme. I went for an interview on Friday which I didn’t think went as well as I might have hoped, and wasn’t as informal as I had maybe expected. I was told at the start that it wouldn’t be like an interview for a job, but having been through training in recruitment and selection it seemed every bit like a job interview. The structure of the interview was every bit as we had been taught, except that we would probably have used a desk.

I don’t know how many applications they get, or how many trainee places they have. I’d had quite a few informal conversations with the organisers about how it might work, and what I might do; some of which were with people who were on the interview panel. I hadn’t been looking forward to having people I knew analysing me in that way, though ultimately I guess it wasn’t to my disadvantage. I’m going to need to start thinking soon about where I’m going to find the money to live off while I’m doing it, but if this is the outworking of God’s plan for me to serve him in Bradford then I guess I have nothing to worry about!

Though, apparently, at the rate of this year’s earnings, it will take me 88 years to pay back my student loan.

A couple of new web sites of note have sprung up over the last week or so. The first, The Dry Road, is by Aaron Bennett and has content from a range of contributors whose names may be familiar to regular readers. I’ve some ideas for submissions, but I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to commit them to bits. The second, The Tarmac Situation, is by Glen Campey and is along similar lines as The Great Pink Earmuff Challenge. Both sites have issues that need to be addressed, but their authors seem keen to do just that, so congratulations to them.

As if that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, thanks to Blogger’s relaunch, I now have a comment system on this site. You’ll have to bare with me while I work out how best to set everything to meet my tastes, but henceforth comments will be enabled on most posts. The new Blogger has bought quite a few other features as well, so I intend to use the next couple of weeks to look at some of the issues that need to be addressed on this site.

What is activism? (with apologies to the SPEAK message board)

Activism is for middle class kids, to allow us whose parents were nearer the middle of the political compass to feel good about ourselves by venting at our Mail reading friends without ever actually having to do anything.

The real challenge is to live the counterculture. That means having nothing to do with injustice, wherever we find it. Sure, if, like Naomi Branded Myself Klein’s kids from the Bronx, you wear Nikes, return them. But no activist does. What do we have to give up? Why do we have no stories like that one of things we have done that made the corporations quake? It’s not ’cause we’re flawless already. As Paul so nicely put it in Romans 3 all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It’s time activists sat up and thought about what activism means. Or better still, it’s time we went outside and stuck our faces in the dirt and prayed about what activism means.