Letters from the Crossing Place

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2010-04-30T16:39:00.003+01:00

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World military spending unveiled

2010-04-05T18:19:00.002+01:00

David McCandless of informationisbeautiful.net posted some pretty pictures and interesting figures about military spending at The Guardian datablog. I don’t really understand why I should be interested in how it relates to GDP though? Surely “defence” spending would be better compared to the area of land or number of people it has to “protect”?

Election Issues

2010-03-31T01:31:00.002+01:00

Dear Marsha Singh,

Thank you very much for coming to meet us the other week when we were in London to express our concerns about the arms trade. I was glad to hear you agree, in principle, that advertising of so called “British” arms should not be funded by the tax payer. I am, of course, still pleased that Gordon Brown’s government took the decision to close DESO; but I’m a little disappointed that, in this time when all parties are scouring the public sector for anything they can cut, a pledge to similarly consign UKTI DSO to history has not been one of Labour’s election promises. When there are so many public services that need to be protected, the one department that’s actually offensive to common decency would seem a good one to scrap.

I also wanted to write and find out your thoughts on the other main issue concerning me in the run up to this election—the Digital Economy Bill. I have heard the government plans to rush this bill through before the election without proper scrutiny. This would be a travesty of democracy, as well as the last thing the real digital economy needs. I urge you to do all that is within your power to prevent this. I feel so strongly about this that I would seriously consider voting for the Pirate Party should they field a candidate in Bradford West, as they are the only party to have made sensible, modern manifesto commitments on intellectual property issues. Within your own party however, your colleague Tom Watson, member for West Bromwich East, is much more reasonable and, should your views fall near his, I would hope you might figure out a way of putting a stop this insane power grab by the Business Secretary and the music industry lobby.

A letter to the director of Bradford Animation Festival

2010-03-21T16:15:00.002Z

Dear Deb,

I just saw a trailer on YouTube for a new film by Czech director Jan Svěrák, with production design by Jakub Dvorský. I was greatly disappointed not to be in Bradford for Jakub’s appearance at the Amanita Design design event at the Bradford Animation Festival last year, and was wondering if you had any plans to bring his new work to BAF 2010?

I’m assuming from the seeming lack of an English language web site or IMDb entry, that Kooky’s Return (Kuky se vrací) doesn't yet have a UK distributor, but there’s a little information on the Amanita Design blog. The trailer looks pretty special, and I can’t wait to see a subtitled version.

Credit to RPS for the link.

Valve sent me a press release!

2010-03-08T18:17:00.005Z

My last post was rather gushing and over excited. But I guess I did something right, either in that, or in the e-mail I sent to Doug Lombardi begging him to confirm it, 'cause a press release just dropped in my inbox confirming Steam for the Mac.

Apparently, Valve will be introducing a new feature called Steam Play to the Steamworks API, which allows people to play games they own on one platform free of charge on the other. It also includes cloud saving support, so you'll be able to play part of the the game on, for example, your work PC, then switch to your home Mac part way through and carry on right where you left off. All Valve's future games will be getting simultaneous PC and Mac releases, starting with Portal 2. The Mac will get the same patching schedule as the PC, and Mac and PC players will share multiplayer games and lobbies. Valve describe their Steam partners as "very excited about adding support for the Mac" and say they expect "most developers and publishers" to take part. So, yes, now Steam itself is become the platform.

The first Mac Steam client will be the one currently in beta for the PC, and it's due out in April.

Steam for the Mac?

2010-02-24T04:26:00.003Z

So, Valve relased a beta update for Steam. It has a lot of nice features. It's faster, it's prettier, it does nice community things, it has a clock on the overlay. That last feature alone makes the beta worth opting in to. Buried down the bottom of the feature list though, is something exciting. The HTML rendering engine has been switched from Internet Explorer to WebKit, the technology behind Apple's Safari and Google Chrome.

At the point of reading that, the excitement started to rise. Aside from the immediate performance improvement, uncoupling Steam from Internet Explorer was the single largest step that needed to be taken to uncouple Steam from Windows. Starting the new Steam client, it's a much more beautiful application, and it feels Mac-like in many respects. Noticing the "File" menu had been replaced by a "Steam" menu, the excitement meter was starting to overload. I hit the Steam forums, where it looks like some other people have had similar thoughts.

Discoveries there send me over the edge. I might die of excitement. The new update inlcudes graphics files for OS X interface elements. Today has been noteworthy already, but it's now officially a good day. This is about more than a few games on the Mac, though that alone would be good. In developing Steamworks, Valve have been building a platform. They're the only company with a credible product in the marketplace that can present the PC as an alternative to the consoles. Games downloaded with the ease (and occasionally, price) of the iTunes App Store? Yes please. Networking and social gaming features? Yes please. Sensible DRM? Yes please.

If Valve stick with the "games you buy can be played anywhere" philosophy that has defined Steam in the past, they could do for gaming what Google Docs and Spreadsheets is trying to do for the office suite: break free of the desktop. Pleanty of Steam games already have Mac versions, even if they were released later. It wouldn't be that hard to make such titles available multiformat. It would also redefine PC gaming in an instant, making Steam the platform rather than Windows.

It's safe to assume that if there's a Mac Steam client coming, future Valve games will have native Mac versions. Giving people access to their games on the platform of thier choice would reduce the "but I'd have to re-buy all my software" disincentive to switching away from Windows. More people would switch. More games would be developed. Deveopment would get easier with multiformat APIs. Steam would become the de facto gaming platform on the PC. Developers would see that Games for Windows Live is now pointless. Everybody wins. Well, except Microsoft and Stardock, I guess. Bring on the future.

A call for accountability at Bradford Council

2009-11-20T20:48:00.004Z

Dear Mr. Hopkins,

I am writing to complain about the undemocratic and unrepresentative decision taken by the Regulatory and Appeals Committee on 23rd September of this year to demolish the former Odeon cinema building on Prince’s Way and to grant planning permission to the proposed New Victoria Place development. I now realise that I should probably have written earlier, but I had come to believe that there was no further recourse available to save the building, and was hoping for further legal guidance before submitting my complaint.

I sat though almost the whole of September 23rd’s lengthy meeting, returning for the late session and enduring till the bitter end to witness the committee’s disappointing decision. Particularly infuriating was the moment when it became apparent that the committee were ready to vote five to two in favour of saving the building and so were removed from council chamber to receive private “legal advice”, only to return and vote for demolition. I’m afraid I did not make a note of the name of the council’s legal advisor, but I am sure he acted in good faith and within his remit. What disappoints me is the lack courage on the part of those councillors who changed their vote, unwilling to support what they know to be the will of the people who put them into office.

Another detail I did not make exact notes of was the number of letters the committee had received on the issue. I remember it being somewhere in the region of 2000 opposing demolition, and a figure in support of the proposal that was so small it could be counted on the fingers of one hand. A hand with at least two fingers cut off.

The gratuitous amputation of irreplaceable assets seems to have been a recurring misfortune for Bradford. The former cinema is the last truly iconic building in the city centre. It’s imposing frontage, distinctive domes and red brick construction set it apart from it’s surroundings such that it is not just a beautiful building in it’s own right, but actually symbolic of the heart of the city. In UNESCO’s only City of Film, and opposite the National Media Museum, it seems absurd that a council should entertain a plan to demolish the last remaining 1930s super-cinema. Properly maintained, this building should be an asset to the city: a valuable cultural centre, and a landmark of Bradford’s cinematic history. This is not some building that deserves to be saved because of an adverse affect on the neighbouring Alhambra theatre. This is the only building left which can symbolise Bradford in the same way Big Ben does London, or the Eiffel Tower Paris.

Under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 the local planning authority is required to pay special attention to the desirability of preserving or enhancing the character or appearance of the conservation area into which the former Odeon building falls. One need only look at a map of the conservation area to see that it was clearly designated specifically to include this building, jutting out as it does from the Thornton Road/Prince’s Way junction. On conservation areas, Planning Policy Guidance 15: Planning and the Historic Environment states that the general presumption should be in favour of retaining buildings which make a positive contribution to the character or appearance of a conservation area. It was evident from attending the meeting on 23rd September that no presumption in favour was shown. Instead councillors allowed themselves to be dictated to, accepting a plan that neither preserves the character or appearance of the area, nor can be said to enhance it.

As a fig-leaf to cover their shame, the Regulatory and Appeals Committee wore a single letter from English Heritage, as though this were some objective measure of the building’s value overriding the views of 2000 local people. In truth, of course, the very idea that such value could be measured objectively is clearly a nonsense, and this is a call which PPG15 and the 1990 act empower the local authority to make. The Regulatory and Appeals Committee have clearly shrugged off this duty.

Bearing in mind the above, I would ask that Bradford Council do three things:

Serve Yorkshire Forward and Langtree Artisan with a building preservation notice, preventing them from demolishing the former cinema or altering it in such a way as to affect its character.
Hold a vote of no confidence in the Regulatory and Appeals Committee, removing them from office at the earliest opportunity.
Hold a fully-open meeting of the whole council, at which the two applications approved on September 23rd be reconsidered, taking proper account of public opinion, the building as an iconic symbol for the city, and it’s historical importance in the UNESCO City of Film.

I am aware that various people within the city have presented compelling evidence for the physical health of the building as being fit for use, and I would also ask that such evidence be given it’s due weight in any future debate on the issue.

Update 22/11/2009: I’m glad the version of this that I actually sent to my elected representatives didn’t include the links that embellish the above version. I’ve discovered an asbestos survey that seems to provide the proof that the above linked Mr. Nobel had indeed been negligent. I’ve started a thread on the Save the Odeon Facebook discussion board in the hope that someone can provide futher information.

My few words on Question Time

2009-10-23T03:31:00.002+01:00

John Walker wrote a blog post over at botherer.org earlier this evening that pretty much echos the kind of thing I’ve been saying to anyone who’d listen for quite a while.

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that what one of Walker’s commentors calls the “Getting Off Your Backside And Voting system” in this country is thoroughly inept and only serves to encourage the kind of infantile political debate John describes, I think today has been a deeply troubling day. Not because I don’t think Griffin should have been there—he had every right to be—but because of the effect it will likely have. I suspect Jack Straw’s assertion that this will prove a bad week for the BNP will itself prove a sad misjudgement. Griffin’s target audience will have seen a man who’s views resound with their own shouted down, laughed at and bullied by five of the liberal elite; two of whom don’t even belong in Britain anyway. They will have seen themselves forced to stand and justify themselves before a crowd of Jews, Muslims and foreigners, and they will have asked themselves why the hell they should have to do that in their own country. It’s not a picture they’ll’ve liked. We’ve all had an entertaining evening and patted ourselves on the back for making a fascist look a fool, but Griffin’s base will have grown as a result.

It is a fundamental paradox of democracy that allowing free speech means allowing people you don’t agree with a voice, even if those people would seek to remove your own. A free democracy should allow its members always the option, but never the desire, to vote for its own abolition. Until we find a more sophisticated level of political discourse than was seen tonight, that desire will not be challenged on a meaningful level.

A difficulty with claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance

2009-08-07T02:13:00.002+01:00

Dear Mrs Holdsworth,

I have just come off the phone from discussing my claim for Jobseeker’s Allowance with one of your advisors. From what he was able to tell me, it seems that your staff responsible for processing my claim are either incompetent or persistent liars. Over the last month I have gone through an absurd process of bureaucracy in an attempt to get reinstated my claim which was cancelled in error from 10th June. I am now told that there is no record on your system of any attempt cover the missing weeks.

Upon attending my regular signing appointment at Westfield House Jobcentre on 10th June I informed my advisor that I would be unable to make my next signing as I would be at the Glastonbury Festival with a ticket purchased prior to the start of my claim. I had hoped to be able to rearrange my signing for the day before, but expected to be told to sign off and start a new claim on my return. Instead I was told that I was entitled to ten days of holiday that I could take any time during my claim. I was given a form to fill in giving details of my holiday within the UK, and told that provided I returned it to the Jobcentre before leaving for the festival everything should be fine.

I believe I returned my holiday form to the Jobcentre on 22nd June, two days before my next appointment was due. The staff on the front desk were helpful and friendly, and gave no indication that I was doing anything incorrect or unusual. They told me that I should come back to the Jobcentre on 6th July, the first weekday after I got home, and tore a reminder slip from the holiday form that I was told to present when I returned. Other than that I was given no receipt or acknowledgment of the form I had handed in.

I duly presented myself at Westfield House on the required date, and turned over the reminder slip I had been given. My appearance clearly caused some confusion, and it was some time before I was called forward to see an advisor. I was finally called to a desk where I spoke to one man and one woman who told me that the holiday form I had brought in prior to my departure had been lost somewhere between the front desk and the team who should have put it on the system. My claim had been cancelled as I had, the system recorded, missed my regular signing date on 24th June. They advised me to return home and phone the helpline, asking to make a rapid reclaim, and to request that my claim be backdated to the date my earlier claim had been cancelled in error.

Following the advice given by the Jobcentre advisors precisely, I returned home and called the helpline. I asked to make a rapid reclaim, and was put through a process that could not by anyone be reasonably described as rapid. The gentleman I spoke to appeared to have no access to the details of my previous claim, and was unable to look up basic facts you would think might help in a “reclaim” process, such as the date my prior claim had been cancelled. Nor was he able to simply duplicate the details of my claim, and I was forced to answer a tedious volley of irrelevant questions, the answers to which you must already have had on your system, as not one detail of my situation had changed since my previous claim.

At the end of that call I was instructed to attend Westfield House again, for a starting interview, on 10th July—by which time I had been without income for one month. At this interview I was told that the only way I could hope to have this outstanding period covered was to complete another form requesting that my claim be backdated. I spoke to another helpful lady who, unlike the telephone advisor I had spoken to before, was actually able to look up the details I needed to complete the form accurately. She again admitted that my claim had been cancelled in error by the Jobcentre, and told me that there were notes to that effect on my record. She informed me that my case would need to go before a specialist decision maker who would have authority to issue the JSA covering the missing month. I wrote out in full on the form what had happened to my claim, and how I had been repeatedly told to expect that money. The advisor said she would also give full details, officially recording for the benefit of the decision maker that I was owed the money due to a Jobcentre Plus error.

Prior experience has shown me that one can not expect to receive anything in JSA before your first regular signing date after the initial interview. So I waited until after my next signing on 22nd July before expecting anything further. On 27th July, I finally received a payment of £156.16. I waited a little longer, expecting to hear something by post that would state the result of the backdating decision, and how much regular benefit I could expect going forward. As of today I have not received any written acknowledgement of this current “reclaim”. Slightly bemused as to what period that £156.16 was supposed to cover, I rang today to ask for clarification and also to ask what had happened about the backdating decision. I was told that the payment was to cover the period 6th–22nd July. Before my claim was erroneously cancelled I was receiving £64.30 per week, so that works out correctly. However, I was also told that there is no record on my account of any attempt to claim for the period 11th June–5th July.

Clearly, this should not be true. I can therefore assume only that either Westfield House have lost a form relating to my claim for the second time in as many months, or that I have been repeatedly lied to, and that none of your seemingly helpful staff ever had any intention of passing my documents through the relevant channels.

Ultimately, I assume, this is probably a failure of the system rather than of any specific individual. I am told that you do not have protocol for the restoration of a cancelled claim. This is patently absurd. I can not be the first person ever to have suffered a claim being erroneously shut down—people do, after all, make mistakes. It does leave me rather angry that a month after discovering the error I appear to be back at square one. I hope that, following this letter, you will be able to take some action to expedite my receiving the missing month’s allowance.

Can someone explain economics to me?

2009-06-23T01:02:00.003+01:00

I’ve just been reading an article on The Register slating New Scientist for a lack of understanding of basic economics (it’s fairly old, but I was away when it was published). Now, I’ve never claimed much understanding of economics, but clearly I’m dumber than I thought, ’cause to me The Register’s argument looks like nonsense.

The Register is attacking the classic green anti-capitalist myth that a system built on economic growth is fundamentally flawed because it requires an ever increasing consumption of finite natural resources. It may well be myth but, if it is, I’m going to need the reasons why explained to me in a little more depth than Tim Worstall gives here. He uses sand as an illustration for his argument, pointing out that a quantity of sand converted into computer chips will add significantly more value to the economy than the same quantity converted into wine bottles.

As a basic illustration, that’s fine, but extrapolated to a larger scale it doesn’t seem to hold much water (or wine). Economic growth is fine in this model as long as you assume a nation to be a closed system. Britain’s resource consumption doesn’t have to increase in line with GDP if we use our sand to make microchips. But building microchips will not reduce the demand for glass. All we’re doing is offshoring glass production, whilst continuing to double consumption of sand. If we all become singers our GDP per capita may increase while our sand consumption goes down, but we still want microchips and glass. In fact we probably want more microchips and more glass because we’re now all so rich from singing that we have more money to spend. Total sand consumption has increased again. The fact that it’s mined and processed abroad won’t negate the impact on our environment. We can not live on singing alone. Or, as put by someone wiser than me, how can you have money if none of you actually produce anything?

Is the 360 worth it now?

2009-06-03T00:19:00.003+01:00

I’ve never bought a 360, on the basis that all the interesting games come to PC eventually anyway. But I might have to rethink that attitude on the basis of Natal. It’s going to be many years before there’s a combination of hardware and software support that can deliver that kind of functionality on the PC. I’m not just talking about Milo (there’s no way Molyneux can deliver on what he appeared to show—however good Milo’s facial recognition is, he can still only have a limited range of responses). I’m thinking of the potential for 3D, and movement tracking in 3D worlds: using head tracking to peer round corners, that sort of thing. I’m not at all surprised to see from Johnny Chung Lee’s Procrastineering blog that this is what he’s been working on at Microsoft. From the brief description he gives of the sensors it’ll easily do more than the amazing Wiimote demos he posted in the past, so it’s pretty exciting seeing it come to reality.

I’ve not watched the Sony show yet. The live stream was too choppy to make out, so I’m waiting for someone to post it. It’ll have to be pretty spectacular to top this.

PC World really on the ball

2009-05-04T12:35:00.003+01:00

Taken today in PC World Bradford. Do you think they'd give me my money back after I got home and found I couldn't actually play it?

It's the Zombie Apocalypse. Bring Friends.

2009-04-12T08:56:00.004+01:00

So, today’s the day for celebrating the resurrection of the dead.

Walking back from the dawn service at Undercliffe Cemetery, with central Bradford appearing as scene from the zombie apocalypse. I was reminded of two things: First, how beautiful my city is at dawn on a bright Sunday morning, and that I should make the effort to see it more often. Second, that somewhere between the three church services I’m going to today, I need to find a couple of hours to try out one of the two campaigns I’ve still not played from 28 Days Later, the videogame.

Happy Easter.

No news is good news

2009-02-28T02:39:00.002Z

Ragnar Tørnquist has posted “no news” about Dreamfall Chapters that got me more excited than any actual gaming news I’ve heard in months. Lots of promises to live up to here. The Longest Journey series is one of my favourite in gaming, and I hope the next instalment can summit to the potential the last didn’t quite reach. I’d love to see a game that finally gets the action/adventure blend right. I’ve never really understood why it’s not been done yet. The MMO interface is now so ubiquitous, and to the casual observer would seem perfect for such a task: a blend of full 3D movement with point-and-click for world interaction, in a fashion that many millions of gamers are instantly familiar with. Going back to Dreamfall after WoW the restrictive camera just seems infuriating. I want to look around the beautiful world, but I’m not allowed. It rather breaks the immersion. I can’t help feeling that the mini-games he mentions would too. He does say he wants to make The Longest Journey 2 as well as Dreamfall Chapters though. That’s got to be good news, right? I have faith.

Tornquist also says that Dreamfall suffered massively from piracy, despite the fact that it came with one of the most hated DRM systems ever. I assume he saw the news about Spore being the most torrented game ever. I would actually prefer to buy the game(s) online, and to have them validated online, as long as that means Steam, not SecuROM. I’d also like full SteamWorks support, including achievements and saves synced to the cloud. And I’d like a Steam client for the Mac, with all my games portable between the two formats from release day. I’m a dreamer.

Unsurprisingly, John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun got in quickly with the definitive commentary on this story, but I couldn’t resist adding noise to the signal.

Ecological Economic Recovery

2009-02-26T20:14:00.002Z

Dear Mr. Brown,

You know, back when Mr. Blair finally left some of us had high hopes. You’d talked a lot of good talk over the years and some of the initial signs were even pretty good. But, as with all these things, it didn’t take long for the dream to die. Now everyone’s talking about crisis and the world just seems to grow a little more gloomy and a lot more doomed every day. I guess it’s in times like these that leaders really get tested. But I’m sure you’ve thought that already.

I’ve been out of the country a while, and I’m still finding my feet back in the UK. I don’t really feel qualified to comment on much that’s going on here. But I got another of those round robin e-mails asking for lobbying on some important issue or another and, today, I’m just disillusioned enough to care.

Apparently there’s some big meeting of European leaders happening this weekend, where you’re all going to gather and talk about how we can get more idiots to borrow more money they don’t have to buy more crap they don’t need because that’s what’ll put us on the path to economic recovery. I enjoy foreign travel as much as the next Prime Minister, but I’m not convinced that’s the way.

Among other things of late, I’ve spent some time in India, studying Gandhi. I know you respect leaders with the courage of their convictions, so you probably know much more of him than I do, but I found some of his values really struck a chord. He was all about building a new nation that wasn’t just independent of Empire, but which valued integrity, and where values he saw as traditionally Indian formed the basis for a society with lasting strength.

Personally, I tend to think that the morality of compassion for life and respect for the world in which we live has far more global roots. Sadly, politicians these days don’t seem to like to talk about morality. Maybe it’s because it’s too reminiscent of “values voters” and the “religious right”, ’cause Lord knows we don’t do God in the UK, or maybe it’s ’cause you’re all too afraid of the morality trap catching the proverbial residents of your wardrobes. But aren’t we all a little more grown up than that? Don’t we have a little more integrity?

Maybe it’s because it’s impossible to talk about morality whist at the same time asking for months of detention without trial? Maybe it’s the paying civil servants to sell arms for private companies? Maybe it’s the forcibly making people destitute as a tool of public policy? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the rehabilitation of usurious practices that created this whole mess in the first place.

I guess it may not sit well with your calvinist background calling usury immoral, but a strong sense of morality was the one thing that some of us thought you had over your predecessor. Coupled with a little integrity, that could take you far. Maybe even the rest of us too. Take a look at who’s benefiting from all the stimulus packages, and ask who they’re helping. If it’s making the rich richer and the poor poorer, it’s probably immoral. And if you find yourself arguing that it’ll help the poor in the long term, that’s probably just the coward’s way out. Ask yourself why you really wanted this job.

Maybe you could start by putting a fraction of those rescue packages not in the hands of the institutions that failed us all, but with those who have creative solutions but no finance. Maybe people who have ways to make our way of life more sustainable in the long term. Maybe some of the new jobs could be creating renewable energy. Maybe you could put that as a challenge to some of these European leaders you’re meeting on Sunday.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic.

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

2008-12-23T18:31:00.000Z

This was written a few weeks before Touching Base, and before I arrived in the Tibetan exile community in India. I doubt many of you got far enough down that post to be expecting the full post from Tibet that I promised, but if you did, here it is.

Two years ago I spent a couple of weeks travelling in the West Bank and Israel. The holy city of Lhasa, more than anywhere else I’ve been, brought back those memories of Jerusalem. We had only a single week in the whole of Tibet, mainly spent in a Land Cruiser the steering wheel of which had a neutral position 90 degrees clockwise of where it ought, travelling the length of the Friendship Highway. It seems somehow wrong to have enjoyed that time, for fear that I’m becoming a kind of occupation junky, but the rich texture of experience we had there revealed a land of great beauty.

From the roof of our hotel, across toward the Potala Palace, the Lhasa old town appeared part Tuscan hill village, part refugee camp, only in a distinctly Tibetan architecture style that, until that day, I never knew existed. On the floor below, our (slightly malodorous) bathroom had imitation Hello Kitty tiles and our bedroom quite possibly the least comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in—pitted and rough like a tent pitched in a rocky field. At ground level monks roamed the winding market streets shopping for blenders and rice cookers, and Chinese soldiers kept watch on street corners, feet fighting to resist the western beats from nearby Tibetan music stores.

I never happened across evidence of the kind of day to day disruption of livelihoods we saw in Palestine (though I understand rapid industrial development and mining are destroying nomadic communities in the west), yet the presence of the occupation is overwhelming, and the atmosphere stifling. The Tibetan flag is visible only by it’s absolute absence. Pictures of the Dalai Lama are forbidden. Tibetan phrasebooks are impossible to find, and the only guidebook available inside the country is that published by the Chinese government. As I understand it, it’s difficult even to study the Tibetan language beyond a very basic level in school. Back in Hebron I was stopped in the street by people wanting to talk politics, everyone had an occupation story to tell. Here nobody did. People are afraid to trust their neighbours. Even alone they were reluctant to speak to us. There’s simply no sign of dissent. There are no Banksies on the walls here, nor hastily scrawled slogans of night-time activists. Though I’ve not been able to check all the facts independently, we heard stories of shocking discrimination against ethnic Tibetans and legal incentives for Han Chinese immigrants to colonise the country that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

Away from Lhasa the the Chinese presence is less pronounced, but every small town has its Chinese quarter, usually far larger than the Tibetan old town, crowded with restaurants and hotels hungry for a share of the Chomolungma (Everest) Yuan. The few monasteries that remain are sad places, more like museums than centres of prayer and study, with the monks banned from meeting together since the uprising in March. The street patrols by the People’s Liberation Army are less ubiquitous between Lhasa and the border town of Zhangmu, but convoys miles long crawl the shiny new roads through the high mountain passes.

Entering the Chomolungma National Park, for the final drive toward Base Camp, the tarmaced road disappeared, and it started to become apparent why a 4x4 was necessary for the journey. The Chinese rebuilding of the Friendship Highway became an increasingly less obvious work-in-progress, and the track narrower and rougher for the winding passes. The lower dragon-scaled mountains on the edge of the park looked ready to rouse any moment, but for the streams flowing down their sides that gave the whole area the artificial glistening wet look that I thought only existed in Unreal worlds. The larger ones had clouds gathered around their tops as if they were chimneys of some unspeakable power station.

Then, as you summit the final Gyatso La Pass, you get your first glimpse of Chomolungma. Our guide told us that the local name means “beautiful woman” in Tibetan (though Wikipedia says it’s “Saint Mother”), and it’s obvious why people become obsessed with her. The clouds had gathered at smaller mountains. Chomolungma actually produces her own, with the wind carrying the snow from the summit into the clear blue expanse. Descending from Gyatso La toward the Great Himalaya Range, I couldn’t take my eyes off her, turning my head from one window to another with the zigzagging road. And every time she appeared afresh from behind some lesser hill the wonder was just as great.

Base camp itself was a slightly sadder place than I had expected, though it’s hard to say whether that was because of lower tourism, or just it being off season for climbers. Walking the last few kilometres from the modern camp to the foot of the mountain the landscape had become dryer and more sandy and the cliffs more orange. I’m pretty sure Starbuck crashed somewhere near here in 105. In a last show of Chinese bureaucracy, it is forbidden to set even a foot on Chomolungma herself, and the historical base camp site is now only a small military outpost. We were able to climb a small hill for a close up view and photo opportunity.

We had planned to have one final night in the shadow of the mountain at Tingri, but following a landslide on the road our guide advised that we push on to Zhangmu directly from Base Camp. Crossing the Himalayas and descending the narrow gorge toward Nepal the desert of the plateau gives way to incredible lushness. The blockage on the road turned out to be not a natural landslide, but rather a team of over enthusiastic Chinese road builders, who’d detonated not only the cliff-side route of the new road, but that of the old road as well. After a couple of hours waiting while engineers made meticulous adjustments to the position of a large girder that appeared to be supported on nothing, and was due to form a temporary bridge, we were allowed to walk across to a waiting Land Cruiser for the final few kilometres into town.

And that, following one night in a hotel with a stunning view down the Bhote Kosi valley, was the end of Tibet. I’d like to end with “Free Tibet!”, or some other punchy, simplistic slogan, but, in truth, I barely believe Tibet even exists any more. A couple of weeks later in Pokhara, Nepal, we watched Seven Years in Tibet. To visualise the difference between the historical Tibet and the country we visited, and know that not one frame of the film can have been shot there, was one of the most emotional experiences of our journey so far. Later still, while staying with Mel and Steve, an imported copy of the Guardian we saw reported that even the Dalai Lama has now given up. Somewhere there’s hope for the people of Tibet, but I’ve yet to find out where it is.

Things I’m Missing

2008-12-20T12:23:00.008Z

When not on the road, seeing amazing sights, meeting wonderful people or wondering how to teach English, I’ve been chomping at the bit to play some video games. According to the Steam web site there’s a licensed member of the Valve Cyber Café program in Dehradun, but I didn’t get the opportunity to find it. There are no members at all listed in the whole of Himachal Pradesh, so instead I’ve consoled myself watching trailers and episodes of Zero Punctuation in any café with a decent connection and a headphone socket. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, this only makes matters worse. Especially when I find the time to watch half an hour of Game Damage. It’s entertaining enough, but I’m not exactly sure what they think sets them apart from every other gaming TV show that’s been tried before—other than having one presenter who’s already more popular than Dominik Diamond and Violet Berlin combined. There’s only so many times Yahtzee is going to be able to have the final say on the death of point and click adventure games. Which, incidentally, he’s wrong about. The only genuinely good 3D point and click adventure was The Longest Journey (a bargain on Steam). Grim Fandango wasn’t point and click and, pedantically speaking, neither of them were “full 3D”, making use as they did of pre-rendered backdrops. I do want to play A Vampyre Story though, irrespective of what the reviews look like.

Sorry if you were hoping for enlightening travel insights in this post.

Touching Base

2008-12-19T19:14:00.001Z

I suppose, as so often, I’d better open with an apology for the long absence. There’s been a lot going on, connectivity here is dodgy and, well, other excuses that I don’t imagine you’re interested in. After the makes dial-up look quick speeds of Nepal and the price fixing of the Pokhara Cyber Association, which set every café in the city at nearly three times the rate we were paying in Kathmandu, the internet cafés in India are a welcome relief. Sadly tough, the computers themselves are often still painfully slow. For the first time a café with half an awareness of computer security meant I was unable to patch Firefox to 3.x, so tried using (the surprisingly installed) Google Chrome instead. As a first experience with the software, it wasn’t pleasant—presumably because of it’s practice of running every tab as a separate process. When I’m being charged by the minute for access I like to try and do any many things as possible at once. One day I’ll find an internet café properly equipped with Macs, and that will be a glorious day indeed.

We arrived in India on November 17th, the day before our Nepalese visas expired. Leaving by bus from the border town of Banbassa the first obvious difference was the presence of railways. The second was the fascinating array of English language signage. From the board just up from a level crossing warning train drivers to be wary of elephants on the line through the poetic practicality of “we like you but not your speed” and “speed thrills but kills” to the direct quotes from western lyricists found on traffic signs of the winding roads up to Uttarakhand’s hill stations. The hi-vis “school zone” sign in Mussoorie, though, did make me think more of the Bexhill refugee compound than anywhere I’d actually want to send my children.

We spent our first two nights in India in Nainital, which felt rather like having spent two and a half months on the road only to find ourselves at home. Lonely Planet describes it as a town founded by homesick Brits reminded of the Cumbrian Lake District. The hills are somewhat higher than anything in Britain, but the comparison’s not unfair. The Victorian iron railings along the lakeside promenade seemed more Sussex seaside resort than Uttarakhand hill town. Even the voices overheard in cafés seemed to speak with a British Indian accent, and church bells rang out across the lake at night. I think a lake is something Bradford’s missing. The colonial legacy seemed to have left more European denomination churches than “local” religion. I did manage to make a brief visit to the Catholic church, and encountered a spiritual presence there that I’ve not felt in countless Buddhist or Hindu temples. Maybe it’s because it was a serving place of worship not a museum, or maybe I’m just conditioned to react in a certain way to enormous crosses.

From Nainital we moved on to the Navdanya farm near Dehradun. Navdanya is the biodiversity movement founded by Vandana Shiva. They have farms and seed banks all over India where they grow hundreds of crop varieties under threat from de facto extinction beneath the growing weight of industrial farming and patented plants. Seeds are available to organic farmers at no cost—they simply return a portion of their first harvest to the seed bank, keeping another portion to replant the following season. The Dehradun farm was Navdanya’s first, and is also the site of an alternative collage called Bija Vidyapeeth. We turned up hoping just to see the place and volunteer in the fields for a few days. We’d been told we’d have to leave after four days as there was a course starting. For four days we worked, and ate beautiful food with the regular staff sat on the floor of the kitchen. Virtually all the food was grown on the farm, and I enjoyed some of the best potatoes I’ve ever tasted. Every day I would look forward to the gyrating twists of steam that danced above my chai in the dawn light. From there it was a walk out to the fields, usually to harvest mustard, though I also got to put years of canal holidays to good use winding the winnowing fan. Actually living something of the agricultural life, if briefly, gave a fresh insight into some well known parables. I don’t know if it’s the same type of mustard Jesus was referring to, but I found it hard to imagine this stuff growing into a tree birds could nest in the branches of. Crawling through the fields squatted down, painful though it was, did however really show how the harvest is affected by by the soil, and the plants were noticeably different depending on whereabouts the seed had been cast. It was amusing to watch the Egrets waiting around in the empty fields, and then hopping into line behind the plough as it passed, churning up… whatever it is that egrets eat. I guess they’re probably a pest, stealing valuable worms or something from the soil.

The whole place, however, was slightly chaotic and getting accurate information about what was going on proved awkward. It became apparent that people were arriving from all over the world for a course on Gandhi and Globalisation, taught by Satish Kumar, Samdhong Rinpoche and Vandana herself. The opportunity seemed to good to pass up, so we stayed for a further two weeks. Sadly, due to the political situation, the Rinpoche had to cancel, but every other part proved excellent. Satish might be disappointed that I thought he had more to tell the world about Gandhi than about spirituality, but he was a charming man, and an inspiration to learn from. I will be making it a priority to read his books. Vandana seems to have been a somewhat more prolific author, but I’ve picked a few I’d like to start with. She was only with us for two and a half days, but in that time it was as if the whole place came alive. Her speaking carried such authority that several people there said she had rocked their world, as she conveyed with clarity and researched evidence the injustice of globalised trade, and the horror of genetic monopoly. The other students were an amazing bunch also, with some involved in fantastic projects and others just setting out on grand journeys. I’ll be sure to link to any who have sites of interest as things develop. In particular, look out for our rainbow coloured WWGD (What Would Gandhi Do) bracelets. Some said it missed the point, but I think it’s an opportunity ripe for exploitation.

On a couple of days during the course they let us out of the farm, once to visit a Sikh temple, and once to visit a Tibetan monastery. The temple visit had always been planned as, apparently, every Sikh temple will give a free meal to all comers, 24 hours a day—a fine example of Gandhian principles in action. The food was basic but good and the temple interesting, though I have to confess I find centuries old religious shrines decorated with plastic flowers, flashing lights and drapes of finest viscose slightly odd. The monastery visit was planned at shorter notice, following Samdhong Rinpoche’s withdrawal, and it showed. No one really seemed to know what was going on. We got a look round a large stupa, and an even larger statue of Śākyamuni Buddha, before being herded back onto the bus to go… somewhere else. Some of us took matters into our hands and stayed for the afternoon, when we’d heard some kind of empowerment ceremony would be going on. I didn’t really understand a word of it, but it was amazing to see the maroon ocean as hundreds of monks assembled. In Tibet itself we never saw more than three monks together. We sat in and watched from the back, among the lay people. Apparently it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand, and you get empowered just by hearing whatever ancient text it is that the lama was reciting. The whole event felt religious, but had the atmosphere more of a festival as people sat on the lawn listening, but also chatting and doing their own thing. The Tibetan woman next to me had bought her English language copy of The Kite Runner to read during the ceremony.

The day after the course ended we missed the night bus to Dharamsala and ended up sleeping rough on Chandigarh bus station. I say sleeping. That’s probably the wrong verb. These kind of places ought to have internet cafés. I had a lot of catching up to do, and they’d probably run at a reasonable pace at 4am. I’d like to say it worked out worth it in the end, but I’m not quite sure I can bring myself to. We did, however, get to spend the following morning at the Nek Chand fantasy rock garden—a kind of dreamland of rubbish—which we would otherwise have missed. It’s an enchanting place, and well worth a visit, I just wished it could have gone on a bit longer. And that I could have gone there awake.

In the end, it was late evening by the time we finally arrived in McLeod Ganj, home of the Tibetan government in exile, and we were all anxious to get a good night’s sleep as quickly as possible. The following day we moved into a working monastery, which seems to be the cheapest place in town to stay, and started to do a little exploring. We got tickets for a Tibetan music concert that evening, that provided an answer to the perennial question “what does a monk have on his iPod?” The answer: it sounds a bit like Tibetan Boyzone. To start with it seemed it was going to be more a mime show than a music show. Thankfully, as the evening wore on Ronan’s influence died away a little, but it was all performed to backing tracks by solo vocalists. The one man who appeared with a guitar clearly confused the sound engineers, and the feedback spoilt things slightly. The whole show was performed in front of a large painting of the Potala Palace, and it was odd to think that we had been there only a few weeks ago when most of the others in the audience live in the perpetual hope that they will one day see it again.

We spent the weekend on a two day hike up to Triund and back. If the last few kilometres to Everest base camp had been like hauling the One Ring up Mount Doom, this was more like Caradhras—an unrelenting and seemingly never-ending ascent, but one that followed an established mountain pass. Given how it had a name and all, I’d kind of expected an actual place at the top. It turned out to be just a small government run guesthouse and a few shack-like stalls looking out over the valley. The government guesthouse was pretty pricey, so we ended up paying one of the shack owners the same price as we paid for a double room back in McLeod Ganj to sleep in his cold, dark lean-to. He was able to give us a pretty decent dinner and breakfast (not included), and as we were eating I heard what I think must be the most offensive radio advert I’ve come across. The India Today media group was asking people to join their private war on terror with the tagline “Be the change—log on to india today slash war”. I’m not quite sure I can see Gandhi declaring war on anything. And has the rest of the world learnt nothing from seven years of disastrous Bush foreign policy? The Times of India was reporting a few days later that more Indians are killed by lightening strike than terror attacks, calculated as a daily average. Apparently, eight people a day die from lighting strikes in India.

On Monday, the other’s left me. It’s now Friday, and I’m talking over a class teaching “Advanced English” on Monday. I’m not sure I even know what advanced English is, but I’ve sat in on the class the last three days, so hopefully I’m learning something from that. I’ve committed to at least a month’s stay here in McLeod Ganj. If I’ve any time left over once I’ve finished worrying about the next day’s class, I might get to spend some of that time seeing the rest of the sites. It feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface. For one, I’ve not even been near the Dalai Lama’s temple yet. So, of the Tibetan experience, I’m sure I should have lots more to write. And a post on Tibet itself should be following fairly soon.

Adventures in remote places

2008-09-28T04:20:00.011+01:00

Roald Amundsen, one of the great Norwegian explorers who we hear very little about in England, but who beat Scott to the South Pole, once said that adventure is just bad planning. I guess it is a credit to Ger to Ger that our travels in the Mongolian countryside continued to feel like an adventure, despite us (mainly) moving to a well planned itinerary.

The plan had been that we would stay with four different nomadic families over the course of eight days and seven nights, with someone from each family leading us on horseback to the next. The changes began when we turned up for our orientation session, briefing us on nomadic culture and how we should behave. It turned out that the bus we would be taking to the Terelj National Park had moved to a winter timetable. Perhaps that should have told us something, but the immediate effect was to delay our start from 7:30am to 3:30pm, and our return from 4pm to 8am the following morning. We would now be staying eight nights. Initially this seemed like a really good deal. By night four, as our water bottles froze inside our tents, it seemed less so.

It was a great privilege to be staying with nomads and seeing something of their lives, particularly as the plan appeared to fall to pieces still further and one of the families we were supposed to stay with had gone to Ulan-Bator to have a baby. Instead we ended up staying with his sister for one night and then travelling onward on foot to the sister’s mother’s house, lead by our absent host’s deaf mute brother in law. After pitching our tents we were invited for milk tea in a ger which seemed to contain an unending flow of people. Milk tea is a salty, milk drink almost (but not quite) entirely unlike tea. The family we were staying with was large, and the relationships between them seemed only to become less clear as time went on. Everyone was introduced to us in terms of their relationship to the absent host we’d never met, and they all seemed fascinated by us. Most were around our own age, and were brothers and sisters of the new father we had not met, but there were also several small children about who’s parentage I mostly remain confused. With this family more than the others the experience felt somehow authentic. Everywhere we were welcomed wonderfully and had a great time, but here, in two nights, where they were not used to regularly hosting western travellers, we felt we became more a part of the life; rather than being shown a carefully prepared front. Some of them would simply sit and watch us, which was slightly uncomfortable. One of the older brothers and the youngest sister, however, tried their very best to communicate with us. One of our guidebooks contained a translation for the phrase “my camera battery is empty”. I would never have imagined that to be so useful. Their gers were situated at the end of a long plain, at the foot of rocky cliffs leading up to the mountains. Aside from their few tents and livestock there was nothing else to be seen. When, at one point, a couple pulled up in a people-carrier blaring 80s sounding foreign synth-pop the contrast created a scene that appeared almost post-apocalyptic, as if they’d arrived to sell guns to Sarah Connor.

In the middle days of our time away we were due to visit the “Princess Temple”, a ruined shrine to the wife, or possibly daughter, of some long dead Mongolian ruler. Details are sketchy, and it doesn’t seem to have an entry in Wikipedia. We’d been told before we left that we were due to camp over night there, but as we neared the area and begun to hear of it’s remoteness, stories of terrible weather in the area and rumours of wolves nearby we were less keen, and rather concerned about the prospect of being left there alone. The evening we arrived with his mother in law’s family our mute guide communicated to us in sign that we would be leaving for the temple the following morning. On the morning of our fifth day, awaking to find the small river between our tents and the family gers frozen over, we set out by ox-cart unsure of what we would find.

What we found were some of the most spectacular landscapes we’d yet seen, a ruin with a truly magical atmosphere, somewhere nice to have lunch and, thankfully, a safe return to our tents by the family ger before nightfall. So far we had been travelling mainly in lowlands and grassy plains. In this trip we set out into the mountains. We had been told in the International Intellectual Museum in Ulan-Bator that Mongolia is “the homeland of the dinosaurs”. We were travelling nowhere near the areas famed for dinosaur finds, but it was not hard to imagine giant lizards roaming the rugged landscapes we passed through. Towering rock formations contrasted with the falling golden leaves of autumn and marshland which the ox was none to happy about pulling us through. Facing off the back of the cart watching the world disappear, it all felt rather like something out a dream, a feeling only reinforced on our arrival. Hopefully Tansy might upload a couple of her photos, but only the bare frame of the temple remained, with the remains of a caved in burial crypt visible behind. The whole complex was surrounded by what was clearly once a high wall, presumably enclosing well tended gardens. The whole place was now overgrown with wild trees, and carpeted in a think layer of fallen leaves. It was the kind of place where the loot would be purple, if only it wasn’t so peaceful. We had lunch outside the walls, around the blackened remains of someone else’s camp-fire before setting off back.

We stayed with two more families before returning to the city, each a little closer to the village. The last even had mains electricity to their three gers. One of them was empty, so we were fortunate enough to be able to sleep “inside”. The fire kept us warm, and returning to the ger from the toilet at night, the skyward pointing lights created a sight like three miniature pyramid stages. The experience was amazing, but after eight nights I was very much ready see Ulan-Bator again. It felt like coming home. I heartily recommend Mongolia, but come here for the scenery and the people, not for the food. Nine days of goat and noodle soup, goat dumplings, milk tea and, worst of all, salty black tea were quite enough. I can’t help feeling that what we’ve seen here can’t last long. Our children will never have this experience. At the absolute outside I give it twenty years before the remote dirt tracks we travelled on are tarmacked. Closer to the capital they already seem to be getting over them quickly, and we saw that the fords can be hazardous for the trucks the nomads now use to move in winter.

The only real disappointment would be not having got to do more riding. We only got two days, and after that I was glad to stop. I had a new found understanding of why cowboys in old westerns have that distinctive gait. But some more time on horseback near the end, once I’d healed a little, would have been fun. In fact, I didn’t even make it to the end of the second day—our guide saw how much pain I was in and flagged down a passing ox-cart to take me the rest of the way. I was taken on by two men who looked for all the world like Americans, one a highly convincing cowboy, but after only a short distance we stopped at a seemingly random ger, dismounted and were invited in. Watching everyone else disappear over the hill on horseback, along with my phone, wallet and passport, and with no language or clue what was going on, I was rather scared. Sat round a table in cigarette smoke-filled ger, our host produced tankards full of white liquid from an oil-drum sized vat. It seems “horse milk” was the only phrase of English he knew. I had no idea mares’ milk even could be fermented. As you would expect, it basically tastes of gone off milk. Once we’d all four had a glass of the airag, a bottle of vodka was opened. Apparently there’s a rule that once a bottle of vodka is opened it must be finished. Then there was a two litre coke bottle again filled from the vat for the road. I did eventually arrive safely at the next ger with the others, but feeling slightly ill.

Ulan-Bator itself is not an especially beautiful city. Before we left for the countryside I had no great love for it. It does have an impressive market of enormous scale where you can buy just about anything. But, unlike that in Riga, the food section was disappointingly small and, for a country who’s primary diet is dairy based, Mongolia seems to have a distinct shortage of decent cheese. Instead, the so called “Black Market” seems to be the perfect place to buy cheep imported clothes. We’ve visited several Buddhist temples, mostly now museums after the Soviet purges, but they’ve taught me little about Buddhism beyond demonstrating that almost every image I had of the faith was wrong. There were a lot more gory paintings and wrathful gods than I expected. We did meet an American Buddhist who lives in Kathmandu, so we may yet learn more from him once we get there. The State Department Store is, like every such place, full of many kinds of overpriced goods, but is still obviously the product of a nation who’s market economy is relativity young. Next to GUM, it barely seems worth mentioning. One attraction that does deserve a mention is the International Intellectual Museum. Dedicated to the 50 years of work of eccentric Mongolian wooden puzzle creator Zandraa Tumen-Ulzii, this is something truly unique. It contains everything from ornate jewel encrusted wooden puzzle chess sets to the most ridiculous plastic tat. Our guide, who clearly loved her job, would tell us with glee how even the display cabinets in the museum were “made of puzzle”, before Mr. Zandraa himself came out to perform child’s magic tricks in the middle of the tour.

I won’t end by talking about pain au chocolat, as I’m sure the others will cover those at length. Instead, I’d like to make a quick plug for the activities of my friend Ben, who’s camping in parliament square this week in protest against the grotesque treatment of asylum seekers by the British government. Check out their blog.

Two week anniversary

2008-09-15T14:17:00.003+01:00

We’re two weeks in and, predictably, I’ve been updating much less regularly than I’d hoped. I had loads of things I wanted to write about, but I’ve forgotten them all now. The ideas came to me the other night when the battery was dead on my phone so I couldn’t make notes of them. The others are doing rather better than I—they all brought paper journals. Ben’s even put up a few photos on the Wanderers site so, if your reading this elsewhere, head over there to check them out. I’ll try and compose something for a longer post before we head out to the wilderness on Friday, but I just don’t have the patience for this machine any more. Gana’s Guest House has two computers, which is an improvement over where we were in Moscow, but no wi-fi, which is not.

Day 7

2008-09-07T08:52:00.005+01:00

So, it’s the 7th September, we’re one week into our journey and this is the first time I’ve got near a computer for long enough to write a proper blog post. I’ve been writing small updates to my Facebook status using every few minutes of wi-fi I can find, so add me on there for more frequent updates. The temptation to switch from Blogger to Wordpress is increased by the fact that Google have not yet managed to put out a decent update method for the iPhone. No way that’s going to happen while I’m on the road though.

Anyway, we’re in Moscow. Moscow is huge. Not just in terms of the 10.3 million population and 1000km² area—everything is just massive: the roads, the buildings, the nectarines. It feels oppressive, like the architecture of totalitarianism. Everything around dwarfs us so completely. The best example is probably the metro system. It’s easily the most elegant underground system I’ve traveled on, and yet seems designed to remind the user how small they are. It’s almost like walking through Rapture. I think I now know where Ken Levine got his inspiration.

When it actually gets round to being a little more welcoming though, it seems like Moscow has some idea of what it’s doing. We appear to have arrived in the middle of the celebrations of the city’s 861st birthday (an odd number, I’m still trying to work out if they celebrate like this every year). As we walked toward the Kremlin today many of the eight lane highways were closed to traffic and instead filled with stages. We’ve seen some rubbish performances and some downright strange, but we also stumbled across a free concert by (I think) André Previn and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

On Wednesday we leave Moscow for Ulan-Bator on the Trans-Mongolian railway. We arrived here yesterday on the overnight train from Riga, so we’ve a little experience of long distance trains, though we would have been completely stuck were it not for a few helpful English speakers who showed us on our way from one station to the next, how to use the metro and helped us buy our tickets. There’ve also been people who’s help has been a tremendous blessing, despite us not having a single word in common.

We made our journey from Bradford to Warsaw without spending a single Euro on travel. I could write about every driver who picked us up, but the post would go on forever, and I’d have no stories left to share with you all when we get back. Perhaps the most amazing lift Lavina and I had was from a young Polish guy who took us all the way from the ferry in Dunkirk to Wrocław in south west Poland in one 13 hour drive fueled by two entire tubes of caffeine tablets dissolved in two liter bottles of water, and no sleep. Had I known that was his plan I might have been reluctant to get in his van, and yet we felt safer in there than with several drivers who took us much shorter distances.

We perhaps cheated in little in taking a taxi from Warsaw airport, where the final truck dropped us, to the station where we met Ben and Tansy, but the sun was baking and the walk exhausting. From there we took the overnight bus to Vilnius, where we spent most of a day, before taking another late bus to Riga. Thankfully, the first hostel we walked into at around 11pm had space for us, and we got out first bed since leaving home four days earlier. I was very impressed with both Vilnius and Riga, though our visits were fleeting. Riga is beautiful. Every third building seems to be a castle, and the other two are either art-nouveau masterpieces or peculiar wooden builds that look like something out of the American west. Vilnius had much less grandeur, but just as much beauty. I lost count of the number of churches we looked at that day, but St. Anne’s was a highlight. We also got the opportunity to paddle in the river Vilnia, which is not something I’ve ever wanted to do in the river of a capital city before, and discovered what looked like some kind of amazing artists collective in a mural covered gallery beside the river. Sadly the gallery was closed, but we took a few photos.

This plan to blog the journey seemed a lot easier before I set off, before we had any idea how much we’d see in such a short space of time. I’ll try and stick to the highlights so as not to overwhelm/bore you all. If you made it this far, thanks a lot!

Setting off

2008-09-01T01:10:00.002+01:00

It’s not quite stupid o’clock yet but it’s getting on that way. Certainly it’s later than I had hoped. Not that I imagine I would have slept well tonight anyway. By 7am tomorrow we want to be by the motorway on the first stage of our trip, looking for a ride to Warsaw. My bag’s almost packed now. I think I’ve spent most of the evening just moving things around, from one small pile to a slightly larger pile and back again. I feel woefully under-equipped, under-skilled and under-prepared. I’ve realised as I’ve been going through all my clothes that I have no idea what I really need to cross the Himalayas. I also don’t own any shirts which are long sleeved (to keep out the mosquitos) and yet cool (to be worn in hot whether). And all the long sleeved t-shirts I own are dark coloured. Apparently mosquitos love dark colours. I do have a passport with all the right visas in though, so hopefully that’s all I really need.

I guess I’ll probably look back on this in a few months time and think myself quite frightfully naive. I’m trying not to set my expectations for a life-transforming experience too high, but everyone I speak to seems to think that’s what it’ll be. I figure if I just hope to enjoy the trip for what it is then I can’t be disappointed. If I gain marvellous insights about myself or the world then that can only be a bonus.

I’ll be aiming to cross-post everything both here at my personal blog, and at Wanderers, a joint blog that Ben has set up for all four of us to use. Anything I write on Spherical Bowl will also be automatically imported into Facebook as a note, so if you know me on there, check my profile now and again for updates. And, of course, comments can left in any one of those locations.

See you in 2009!

Filling in the gaps - part one

2008-08-27T23:58:00.003+01:00

I needed to scan my visas, so while I was borrowing my friend’s scanner I took the opportunity to do something I’d been meaning to do for a while - scan some of the harder to find cover artwork that’s been missing from my iTunes library. I figure there must be others out there who have these CDs but are missing digital copies of the cover art, so I’m sharing them here for your benefit. That has to be fair use, right? This’ll be part one of a continuing series, but it'll be a while before there’s another one. I’ve started with some stars of Greenbelts past: four albums each by Coastal Dune and Why? They’re not terribly good scans, and the sleaves themselves have suffered some wear and tear, but they’re better than nothing. The Till We're Old cover isn’t square, so I’ve saved it as a PNG. Transparency appears to work in coverflow within iTunes, but not in coverflow on the iPhone. If you have better versions of any of these, leave a note in the comments.

Rising Sun

2008-08-26T23:53:00.002+01:00

Past experience has taught me that I ought to write up my thoughts on Greenbelt as soon as possible, else I end up saying nothing at all.

There’s something somehow unique about Greenbelt. I just love it. Unexpected tragedy excepted, the end of Greenbelt is the saddest time of my year, in a way that even the end of Glastonbury can’t match. Greenbelters sometimes joke that it’s the third festival after Christmas and Easter, made all the more apt this year by the peculiar preponderance of carols. So, to misquote Wizzard, today I really do wish it could be Greenbelt every day.

That would, of course, be both foolish and impossible. Festivals exist to celebrate and inspire the lives we live for the rest of the year. So what were my highlights of this year?

First, Beth Rowley, who was simply stunning. And she played Greenbelt before she went massive, so it felt like one of our own coming home. Stephen Sizer never ceases to impress, with both his factual knowledge and his ability to cut through theological nonsense. He also pretty much saved my faith a few years back, by being the only writer able to offer a comprehensive biblical explanation for why my God is not a racist, so that was another point in his favour. Following her appeal last year for the church to rediscover the sin of usury, Ann Pettifor was this year calling for a Grand Jubilee cancelling all first world debt. Yes, that includes your mortgage. Her place in my mind as the greatest prophetic voice of our time is just about secured. Finally, Believe is a terrifyingly brutal yet thought provoking play in which Linda Marlowe portrays four women from the old testament and forces us to consider the impact of faith in today’s world. I needed a visit to the organic beer tent when it was over, but it’s probably a highlight not just of this Greenbelt, but of all eleven I’ve been to.

I guess part of what I love about Greenbelt is that, after all that time, I can barely walk around the site without bumping into someone I know. So my lowlight would be not having had the time to catch up with everyone I would have liked to, knowing I’d not even spoken to others, and also that some who should have been there weren’t.

Oh, and seeing my name in the programme was kind of nice too. It made me feel important, even if it wasn’t really deserved.

Radiohead on a Spectrum (and a printer, a scanner and some broken hard drives)

2008-08-19T23:58:00.007+01:00

Chewing Pixels is fast becoming my number one place to discover the curious and the beautiful online. I don’t think I’ve shared any of his links outside of Facebook before (I do most of my blogging there now), but I’ve been too active on there of late, and this place has been looking rather neglected. Anyway, this time it’s the graduation project of one James Houston, until recently a student of Glasgow School of Art’s graphic design course. It’s a remix of Nude from Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, but he explains more at his Vimeo page.

Beyond this, I have had several posts in draft for a while —a sort of mini series of technological complaints— but I just can’t seem to find the time to finish them off. If I’m feeling energetic I’ll get them up over the next week and a half. I know this is supposed to be a blog about faith and prayer in Bradford. Maybe I’ll get back to that once I return from my travels. I the meantime, I’ll try and post some updates whenever I can find an Internet cafe.

Glastonbury '08

2008-07-06T17:00:00.002+01:00

Dear Michael,

It’s now been nearly a week since I left your farm, so I thought I should write and thank you for another fantastic festival. To no-one’s surprise, you proved all the critics wrong. Tickets finally sold out, as we all knew they would. And those who said that Jay-Z would be bottled off stage clearly have no understanding of what Glastonbury’s all about.

I think my highlights this year were Jay-Z (obviously), The Verve, The Ting Tings and Vampire Weekend. The albums I’m most likely to buy next based on what I saw are Marry Me by St. Vincent and Youth Novels by Lykke Li. I would be getting The Langley Sisters’ album as well, but they don’t appear to have one yet. I’d not intended to see The Verve, but had a snap last minute change of heart on leaving Suzanne Vega’s gig in the Acoustic Tent. They turned out to be much better than I expected, though there was really no need for Richard Ashcroft to dis you like that. The same is true of the Ting Tings, who I'd expected to hate, ’cause I find that song really annoying.

Next year, I’d love it if you could book Sigur Rós to headline. In my opinion, they are the greatest band in the world right now, and they deserve a place on the world’s greatest stage. I still consider their performance on the Other Stage in 2003 to be the best gig I’ve ever been to, but I want to see them where those epic sounds really belong: in the dark, with the light of the top of the Pyramid pointing skyward above them.

I suppose I have to confess before I end that my actual highlight this year was Katie Melua. So, a special thanks for booking her. None of my friends would come and see her with me and, quite by accident, I ended up on the front row. I don’t think I’ve been on the front row of a gig since I was about 16. I felt well old. And probably looked like some kind of weird creepy stalker man. I’ve taken some abuse for saying I loved her set, and I guess I’ll take some more, but I don't care. I think I could literally listen to that girl sing the phone book.

Apple's offensive pricing strategy

2008-01-16T13:48:00.000Z

So, yesterday was MacWorld Keynote day…

Seven days ago, Apple announced an imminent price reduction on the UK iTunes store, for the first time bringing about standardised music pricing throughout Europe. In their press release Apple threatened to reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level within six months. Suddenly it was clear why Apple is unpopular with the record labels. Why only one major label has opened up their DRM free music to Apple. Here was a retailer genuinely working for the good of the British consumer, threatening to reshape the music industry for the benefit of the customer rather than the corporation.

Yesterday Steve Jobs stood on a stage in San Francisco, and announced a slew of cool new products. Time Capsule is a wireless bass station with a built in hard drive, designed for use with Leopard’s rather excellent Time Machine backup utility. This would be great, except that one month ago I bought an Apple wireless bass station with the intention of connecting an external drive for that exact purpose. But it’s OK, because Jobs says that Time Capsule is very aggressively priced as they want people backing up their content. Time Capsule costs $299 for the 500GB version, or $499 for 1TB. Bargain. And not that unfavourable when compared to the price a standalone drive for my existing Airport Extreme base station would have been.

Right now, one dollar equals just shy of 51 pence sterling. That should make the 1TB Time Capsule something in the region of £254. I’d probably lose out considerably ebaying my Airport Extreme so soon after buying it, but it’d be worth it for the hassle free wireless backups. In the UK however, Apple are advertising Time Capsule at £329—the best part of £80 more than it should be.

The same is true of their rather attractive new laptop, the MacBook Air. Steve Jobs advertised it at $1799, or £917. I’d expected a slight UK premium on that, maybe £999. An $1800 dollar laptop really should be sub £1000. Once again however, Apple are selling it at £1,199—over 30% more than in the US.

I guess, when it comes to the price of Apple’s own products, they won’t favour the British consumer until the courts compel them again.

Dispatches: Unholy War

2007-09-17T23:08:00.000+01:00

Channel 4 have just screened an edition of their Dispatches documentary series investigating threats made against muslim converts to Christianity in the UK. More information is available on their Dispatches web site and, at the time of writing, the show is available for Windows users to watch online through their 4OD service.

There were several issues raised by this programme which I believe need an urgent and prayerful response. I’m not yet sure what that response should be in every case, so I’ll leave it to your discretion; but do please share any thoughts below or on the I promise to pray for the city of Bradford every day Facebook group.

Firstly, the main narrative of the show followed a Bradford family who converted to Christianity and faced five years of harassment, death threats and destruction of property before finally being forced to move away from the city. The family’s church in Manningham, which was shown but not named, had also suffered intimidation and vandalism as a result. According to the show, there are 3000 former Muslims in the UK who face such persecution.
Secondly, the show made pointed references to the problem of bogus asylum seekers seeking to bolster their case by claiming a fraudulent conversion to Christianity.
The middle third of show was given over to highlighting the dangers of American Evangelicals who come over to the UK and stir up trouble by deliberately targeting children, divorced women and other vulnerable Muslims for evangelisation. Chief among their organisations of concern was a group called Caleb, who’s UK base is in Bradford. The fact that Caleb Project Europe ceased to be two years ago seemed only to deepen the presenter’s suspicion, particularly given that several of the old Caleb team remained in the UK, working independently and continuing to rent the same office space. Caleb’s operations in Bradford were portrayed as shadowy and somewhat sinister. The presenter managed to elicit a condemnation from the Bishop of Rochester, who’d never heard of Caleb. No mention was made of whether they’d attempted to contact the Bishop of Bradford, or any of the many other reputable groups with whom Caleb have partnered.
Finally—and this wasn’t mentioned in the documentary—there is another, entirely unrelated, Christian project in Bradford that goes by the name of Caleb, who run addiction recovery programmes. There’s a lot of potential for confusion here.

Find her. Save her.

2007-09-16T18:47:00.000+01:00

A few years ago I played through Bioware’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It won stacks of awards, and was undeniably one of the best games of 2003. It was also the first time I’d played a proper RPG. The concept of levelling a character was entirely alien to me, and I didn’t do a very good job of it. By the time I reached the grand finale I’d spread my experience points so thinly that defeating the final boss was nigh on impossible.

The inventory, storytelling and character interaction, though, were familiar gameplay elements, reminiscent of the classic adventure games of my youth; Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango etc. I installed a copy of ScummVM and, through the likes of Adventure Gamers and Just Adventure, discovered that the adventure genre wasn’t nearly as dead as I’d been led to believe. I downloaded demos of The Longest Journey and Syberia. I scoured the shops in a vain effort to find these fabled saviours of narrative gaming. I discovered that the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police wasn’t the death knell I’d thought—that the exiles of LucasArts had gone their separate ways and founded many exciting new companies. I subscribed to Ragnar Tornquist’s blog. And then I got rid of my computer.

Last night, after years of anticipation, as the proud (and only slightly smug) owner of a shiny new MacBook Pro with a specially created Windows Vista Ultimate partition, I completed Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. It’s one of the best games I’ve played, and easily deserves to be listed alongside the greats mentioned above. I could give a list as long as you’d like of things that could be improved with the game, but none of them detract from the fact that it showcases some finest writing ever seen in a game, and for that alone you should play it.

Basically this whole post is a rather longwinded way of saying that you should buy this game. Now. It’s only a tenner off Steam. Go on. Find her, save her.

The Deathly Hallows (spoiler free)

2007-07-31T12:16:00.000+01:00

I finally finished reading the Potter chronicles yesterday. Tycho of Penny Arcade describes the experience thus:

I finished the last Harry Potter yesterday, but I couldn't actually tell you what happened in it. It's been like that for several books now, starting with The Order of the Phoenix, where I grip the book with hunger and aggression and consume it without ever tasting the meal. I have a sense of being satisfied, but it is murky, and distant, the way an anaconda must feel one week after eating a jaguar. What is most important is that the wait, that long famine, has come to a close.

I had steered clear of reviews until now, but I think that's probably the most accurate one I'm likely to read. It's been like that for me since Goblet of Fire. I still couldn't tell you what happened at the end of that book. One of the things that most impresses me in Rowling's stories is the way things all tie to together. Unlike other people (George Lucas) who claim to have planned a saga, but clearly made it up as they went along, she appears to have actually been telling the truth. I feel I would get so much more from it if I could actually remember what happened in Half-Blood Prince.

Last night, all remained clear in my head, but it's fading fast. I guess at some point I'll just have to reread the whole lot…

Confirmed: DESO to close

2007-07-30T16:02:00.000+01:00

Last Wednesday the Prime Minister's office formally announced plans to close the Defence Export Services Organisation. SPEAK have a press release, and also an example letter to send to Gordon Brown. Note that the Prime Ministerial statement says that the functions of DESO are to be reallocated to other departments, not ceased completely. It's important, therefore, to write and ask that this not just be a continuation of the status quo by another name. If not removed altogether, funding for arms promotion should, as a minimum step, be limited to an amount proportional to the share of UK exports they represent.

What shall we abolish next?

2007-07-16T16:18:00.000+01:00

One week ago The Guardian reported that the Treasury plans to shut the Defence Export Services Organisation. This has been a long running SPEAK campaign, and I ~~might have~~ got a little over excited in my immediate response:

Dear Marsha Singh,

I am writing to express my unbridled joy at the news, as reported in this morning's Guardian, that the Treasury is planning to disband the Defence Export Services Organisation. This obviously corrupt and unnecessary government department has long been a blot on Labour's record of reforms and I know I represent many when I say I will be pleased to see it go.

I expect that this news will have come as a nasty shock to many involved in pushing so called "British" arms, and that an intense period of lobbying will now ensue. I would ask that you now write to Chief Secretary to the Treasury Andy Burnham and request he show the strongest resolve in following through on these plans. The fact that the arms industry continues to receive DESO's subsidies is clearly contrary to every principle of free trade; to say nothing of the obvious ethical questions, and the fact that no British civil industry is supported in such a way. I therefore ask that you also express to the Chief Secretary how important it is that closure should mean closure, and that the function of DESO not be passed elsewhere within government.

Obviously you don't all need to be quite that gushing, but I would urge you to write to your MP with similar requests, and also to sign the petition on the Downing Street web site.

Redesign

2007-02-12T10:14:00.001Z

Regular visitors to sphericalbowl.co.uk¹ will have noticed that I’ve given the site a bit of a visual overhaul. Faced with the prospect of imminent redundancy, it seemed sensible that I should prepare a portfolio of sorts. There's still a bit of tweaking and tidying to be done, and I suspect I might have to revisit a couple of things I bodged since the last redesign, but so far everything’s holding together in most modern browsers. Something bizarre is happening in IE, which I guess should be the first priority. For the moment though, if you’re still using that browser, hitting refresh a few times seems to fix it—which is odd, given that the code is completely static.

¹ I realise regular visitors these days are probably the Googlebot and er… no one else

Oh! Web two point oh

2006-06-30T14:30:00.000+01:00

So, I finally gave in. I’ve created a MySpace account. I’ve always avoided it before. I dislike the exclusivity of it all. It’s clearly the most heinous crime committed against all that’s decent in the world of web design for many a long year. It’s splattered indiscriminately with ads as if someone flicked the bristles of a paintbrush. There’s the ongoing all your content are belong to Murdoch issue. But most of all it’s the complete lack of RSS feeds that both irritates me and has been the reason for my eventual submission. And I resent that.

There’s a countless mass of social networking sites. I have friends who use quite a few of them. There are lots of blogging tools, all enabling people to publish their thoughts individually on fully customisable personal sites with comments, trackbacks and other forms of interactivity. And for every person I want to read that’s another visit I have to make to some other random site. If I want to stay up to date I have check them all. Every single day. MySpace is simply one amongst the miscellany. I am thus forever indebted to the person who first thought up syndication. These days the only site not in my Bloglines feeds that I begrudge to check regularly is the WoW Europe homepage.

And that brings us to the crux of my objection to MySpace. By not providing feeds in standard format News Corp effectively ensure that the only way you can keep track of multiple friends is with a MySpace subscription. And this is not just some technical oversight of a company behind the times. It’s a deliberate part of their business model, an attempt to monopolise the blogosphere. I don’t want to write on MySpace, I’m quite happy writing (occasionally) in the same place I have been for the last seven years. Signing up to MySpace feels like the first step on the slippery slope back to the bad old days.

Yet here I am. I’ve made my first post, posted simultaneously at sphericalbowl.co.uk. I don’t intend on using it actively. I just want to monitor my friends’ blogs without having to bookmark every single one. I might post on MySpace at the same time as updating my main site in future if I can be bothered. And I’m back to checking two sites a day rather than one.

Update: OK, so I've found MySpace's RSS feed. I could've sworn it wasn't there this morning…

Atom

2006-06-05T15:05:00.000+01:00

I now have an Atom feed.

2006-06-02T17:02:00.000+01:00

How do I get myself into these things? Last weekend I met up with a group of folk from my time on Transform. It was wonderful to see everyone. We had a great time chatting, eating, catching up and praying for one another. It transpires that Chris is going back to Mostar this summer. I knew he’d always planned to, but now he needs the funding. Without even thinking about it, somehow I’d opened my mouth and offered to walk the Yorkshire Three Peaks with him. I’m really unfit. This is a 25 mile trek that Wikipedia describes as gruelling. It seems there’s some kind of elite club you can get into if you do it in under 12 hours.

We’re doing it on 1st July. I’m going to try and buy some walking boots tomorrow. You can sponsor me if you’d like.

2006-01-27T01:22:00.000Z

What’s God’s Bradford Vision?

2005-08-25T14:39:00.000+01:00

Besides not having written an proper updates for ages, while I was out of the country I also slipped somewhat behind with the side column showing what I've been reading. I don't imagine that you're all that bothered, but I feel that I should catch up, and this is easier than writing the piece on Bosnia that I promised.

Along with James Thwaites' Renegotiating the Church Contract, the first book I listed on my return, I also read Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia, C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian and of course the inevitable. I'm feeling somewhat inspired by C.S. Lewis just at the moment. I'd fallen away from my plan to reread the Narnia books, but spurred on by anticipation of the upcoming movie, I can tell you that Prince Caspian is in no way done justice by the old BBC adaptation. I've just started on The Screwtape Letters, which I've also read before, and Lewis's talent for insightful summaries of complex issues is breathtaking. I don't remember it being this good before…

2005-07-31T23:54:00.000+01:00

Arg... So, yeah, I've pretty much missed my chance to not go a whole calendar month without posting. In my defence, I have spent half of this month out of the country on mission with Novi Most International. I've started trying to draft something on it today, but the computer's playing up and I can't be bothered right now. I'll tell you about it later.

2005-06-15T22:08:00.000+01:00

It’s taken me a while to get round to posting this, so any of you that read 24-7prayer.com regularly will have seen it already. In an article posted at the end of last month Pete Grieg leaves a few comments on the global prayer movement. He mentions one young man considering becoming a monk so as to devote himself to undistracted prayer. As the end of Transform draws ever nearer and the uncertainty of my future becomes ever more noticeable, I can so relate. I suspect it’s not quite my calling, but I’m making a mental note to find out more about monastic communities when I have some time.

2005-05-25T17:39:00.000+01:00

It seems like a scam and looks like a scam says Newsnight of freeipods.com. They’re right. It does. But they then go on to say that, surprisingly, it’s not. As do Wired News, and a whole bunch of other news sites. The Newsnight story (dated last September) says they don’t operate in the UK, but looking at their web site, they apparently started about a month ago. So I figured that it had to be worth a try. If you think so too, then I very much recommend reading the terms and conditions thoroughly, as there’s certainly some stuff in there that would have caught me out had I not. Once you’ve done that, I’d be appreciative if you could enter by way of my link, so I get credit toward that pink iPod mini I’ve been wanting...

2005-05-21T23:48:00.000+01:00

I know it’s a bit late, but it’s time for my election reflection (that’s actually mainly a repost of a comment I made on Rachel’s blog weeks ago).

This year, for the first time, I gave serious consideration to not voting, or at least spoiling my ballot. I’ve been thinking a bit recently about issues surrounding power and the Christian use of it, and I started to wonder whether it was something I wanted any part in.

I’ve heard and read quite a bit in the last few months on church unity, church history and several issues which have caused church division. It’s very clear the church has spent far too long acting as a worldly power, and far too little time as an imitator of Christ. There are many issues that everyone knows are important to the Christian vote, most of which are helpfully(?) listed by the Christian Institute, together with details of how your MP has voted on them in the past. Whether you agree with their interpretation of “Christian morals” or not (and personally, on at least some of those issues, I certainly don’t), a question remains over whether they are issues on which we have the right to demand legislation.

Is Britain still a Christian nation? Was it ever? Is a Christian nation even possible? Would it be a good thing if it were? I’m increasingly of the opinion that the answer to all those questions is “no”. Christ was a powerful voice because he spoke with humility from a position of service, and because he lived what he taught. His ultimate victory came in total submission and with the impression of defeat. He preached uncompromising truth, but initially required only one thing: repentance.

In a country where only about 5% of the population now attend church, can we really expect the election to reflect Christian values? Should we even want it to? And what is the aim of seeking to enforce a Christian morality in the laws of our nation? Are we hoping that we will somehow make people pure, and thus achieve their salvation by obedience to law? Is that the gospel?

2005-05-11T22:37:00.000+01:00

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

John 15:12-15

How is it that I can stand in worship with my arms raised and hands unfolded toward heaven, when Christ had nails driven through his palms in my place?

2005-04-03T22:57:00.000+01:00

I finished reading Stephen Sizer’s book. To call it alarming would be something of an understatement. I was left with a profound feeling of anger at the horrifying manner in which Christianity is being corrupted, and faithful people being led astray by this teaching. Amongst many things Sizer brings into plain light are the justification of ethnic cleansing in the name of Christianity and attempts by so called Christians to reinstitute the sacrificial system, thus denying the very death of Christ. Most alarming, perhaps is the scale of this movement. These are not a few weirdos, but rather big name influential Christian speakers. As Sizer says in his conclusion conservative estimates would suggest that the Christian Zionist movement is at least ten times larger than the Jewish Zionist movement and has become a dominant lobby within contemporary American politics.

The statement Challenging Christian Zionism is included as an appendix to the book and, while I know very little of the political situation, defiantly seems worth a read.

2005-03-31T13:47:00.000+01:00

I’ve been reading quite a few exciting books just recently. The last, Pete Greig’s The Vision and the Vow, I felt an immediate urge to buy for everyone I know. It contained so many passages I’d love to be able to quote in huge blocks right now. That, however, is not really the point of this post.

The point of this post (aside from making sure I don’t go an entire month without posting) is to explain the link on the left to the book I’m currently reading. That book is Christian Zionism by Stephen Sizer. If you click the link you will notice that it takes you to the publisher’s web site rather than the usual Amazon.co.uk page. As far as I can make out it’s not presently listed on Amazon. If I were conspiratorially minded, I’d be suspicious. The page I’m linking to is from the inside of a frameset, so you may find that if you want to buy a copy (and you should) you have to go to the IVP Books homepage and navigate from there. A search for Christian Zionism should do it.

The book paints a frightening picture of the way in which the evangelical church has been hijacked for an extreme pro-Zionist agenda based on questionable eschatology and a distorted image of God. Whilst a lot of what is discussed has been limited to the United States, it’s plain to see the increasing influence of end-times teaching in the political actions of the British church. Anyone with even a passing interest in eschatology or the signs of the times (and I’m pretty sure every Christian will encounter those at some point) should read this book.

2005-02-26T18:31:00.000Z

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but it seems I’ve barely been able to sit down over the last week without seeing a trailer for The Exorcism. This programme went out late on Thursday night accompanied by many warnings that it was for adults only and may contain material that some viewers would find disturbing. Until I started watching I’d been planning an early night. The sleeping would have been considerably more entertaining. I’m not quite sure what Channel 4 were expecting with this show. Were they really hoping that someone possessed by Satan himself was going to sign up, go though several weeks of tests and then just walk into the studio? Deliverance ministry is something that requires much discernment and, I would have thought, a swift resolution when prompted by the Holy Spirit. Clearly I’m in no position to judge whether Channel 4’s “test subject” had a genuine problem with spiritual oppression, but you’d have thought any one of the many clergy and other church figures involved could have told the producers that they were never going to get the drama they were hoping for. There was no explanation given as to the nature of spiritual powers, and host Krishnan Guru-Murthy continuously gave the impression that they were dealing with the devil. As any theologian could have told them, the devil (unlike God) is not omnipresent, and probably has better things to do. I would imagine that there probably is some kind of occult ritual that might summon him, which might have made for a more dramatic exorcism, but I wouldn’t trust any Christian minister who agreed to be past of such an “experiment”.

Sorry. Rant over. For what it’s worth, my own experience took two people about an hour and a half, and was far from that calm.

2005-02-25T23:48:00.000Z

Update: I’ve never deleted a post from this site before. I hope I never have to again. I don’t want to try and justify myself, and I can’t really offer any kind of explanation. But I would like to apologise unreservedly to those who I’ve hurt. It seems that I’ve been read in ways I never imagined I would. In seeking to record my own feelings I’ve portrayed my life, and the lives of others in a grossly inaccurate manner. I’ve not been honouring to either my friends or to God and can’t even hope to make it up. I’m sorry.

2005-02-03T09:42:00.000Z

Andii Bowsher seems to have quite a skill for finding interesting links. Accrding to this Wired article Brazil spends more of software licensing than it does on combating hunger.

2005-01-27T11:05:00.000Z

Kind of encouraging.

2005-01-08T18:52:00.000Z

I failed somewhat in not plugging this beforehand, but last night was the climax of a second ecumenical new year 24-7 prayer week for the city of Bradford, this time ending with an awesome four and a half hour Prayer and Praise Evening at the cathedral.

This year’s venue was Youth Base on New Hey Road, BD4. It’s a much smaller building than the one we used last year, but the prayer room was on the top floor, with an amazing view out over the city. On returning from the cathedral last night I stopped briefly to read the latest 24-7 e-bullet and clicked a link to this page, which expresses everything way better than I could hope to. I’d not heard any testimonies of time in this prayer room, and I wasn’t expecting to find one there. I wept and praised. It’s still an exciting time to be in Bradford.

2004-12-08T23:50:00.000Z

Look at this. Almost exactly one year on, and it’s like I’m living my life in stupid little circles. Somewhere, when trying to get my head round what freedom from a spirit of rejection meant, I think I got the wrong end of the stick. I’m wondering how many more times I can put myself through this, and how to get to that point where I don’t need to. I must have wasted hours rehearsing improbable scenarios in my head when all that’s likely is some kind of less endearing Holden McNeilesque explosion, in which all the things that logic dictates would be better left unsaid end up on the floor in a tangled knot of gibberish half sentences.

2004-11-28T22:05:00.000Z

These signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.

Mark 16:17-18

2004-11-25T13:21:00.000Z

About a year and a half ago a friend prayed to cast out a spirit of fear out of me, and that I would instead be filled with the Holy Spirit. I never mentioned it to anyone as I didn’t really understand what had happened, but I assumed I was free of it, and all was good. For a while it definitely helped, and I grew closer to God. I guess in the end though either it wasn’t gone, or I let it back in, because the other week I had cast out of me spirits of fear, rejection, shame, lust, cynicism and scepticism.

Two months ago, if you’d told me I was going to have any real life experience with the demonic I would have been highly doubtful. It’s not that I didn’t believe in it, it’s just that it’s the kind of thing that happens to other people, in countries a long way from Bradford. I’d not given it much credit, or even much thought. I’d probably’ve assumed that anyone who said they’d had any involvement with deliverance ministry/exorcism in the UK was a bit of a weirdo, or at least that they were connected to one of the slightly crazier fringes of Christianity. All involved in what happened to me, though, were people who I’ve known for a number of years, for whom I have the deepest respect and whom I trust implicitly. They’re not weirdos.

I was at a Christian weekend away, it was Saturday lunch time and there was a break in the programme during the afternoon. I was planning to go for a walk—see some of the surrounding area. God had other plans. One of the leaders from Transform had been giving a seminar in the morning, but I knew she was doing something that I’d already heard both at Transform and at a previous event, so I went to the alternative talk on the Holy Spirit instead. As it turned out, I’d heard that seminar at Transform a few weeks before as well, but somehow at the end I felt that while I knew everything that’d been said I somehow still didn’t get it.

I grabbed one of the speakers just as she was leaving and asked if she had time to talk. I kind of got the impression that she didn’t really, and we stopped next to the exit of the place we were staying. I was saying that I felt like the guy in Mark 9:24 who says to Jesus I believe; help my unbelief. We’d had all this teaching on the power of the Holy Spirit and the authority we have in Christ, and I believed that God will do amazing things, but somehow I still didn’t believe that I will see God do amazing things through me. We talked for a while, and in the end I was saying that I just wanted evidence of something small, in a non-threatening setting, before I tried anything big in front of lots of people. She pointed out that actually that wouldn’t be faith, but I guess I kept on along those lines, ’cause eventually she called me on it, and told me to pray for her and see if God had anything to say. After a few failed moments trying to think up an excuse I gave it a go.

I actually physically couldn’t do it. It was quite the strangest thing I’ve ever encountered. I started just by thanking God for her, but as I tried to go further I started shaking, and then I started coughing. Now, apparently this is a good sign of the demonic. She sent a passer by to find the vicar who was giving the main teaching for the weekend, but he never showed up, so I guess they didn’t find him. Another friend was coming past at the time, so she grabbed her and together they ushered me off into a side room with a little more privacy. They continued to order the spirit of fear out of me in Jesus’ name, and I continued coughing, and started choking and coughing up stuff. One of them produced a bin from somewhere and said something along the lines of it’s normal to throw up now if you need to. So I spent the best part of the next hour and a half with my head in a bin. I wasn’t actually sick, but I coughed up a lot of stuff, and my nose ran lots, and I generally didn’t look very pleasant. Apparently some of them came out with an unearthly bad smell, but I didn’t really notice—I had my head in a bin. Apparently I bent into shapes that aren’t natural for a human being, but I couldn’t see, as I had my head in a bin (I did have a sense that I was at least in shapes that weren’t natural for me).

After the fear spirit came out one of them prayed against anything else that was in me, and stated that nothing had any power over me because I am owned by Christ. I kept coughing, so they prayed that God would reveal anything else that was inside. I guess the rest all came from Him, because then one of them named rejection, He gave me the word shame, they named lust and cynicism and I named scepticism. One by one they came out, and after each was an intense feeling of liberation. After most I sat up breathed a sigh of relief and said how much better I felt—then more came, and my head went back in the bin.

I’m told the word which in the Bible is translated possessed is actually much better translated oppressed. It’s not that spirits (usually) force you to do things you don’t want to do, so much as they stop you from fulfilling what God wants for you. Since that day I’ve felt like I’ve been on one massive spiritual high. I keep expecting it to end, the way it normally does after some kind of big event, but that hasn’t happened. Every time I think it’s nearly over God does something else awesome and I get excited all over again. I’ve felt so much more free, particularly I’ve felt free to pray for things, and as a result the last few weeks have seen a phenomenal amount of answered prayer.

Apparently this more than likely means that there is something or things in my life which allowed all of these demons to get in. For some of them, that’s quite obvious. For others it’s not so. I’ve got quite a lot to work through, and I’ve not got very far, but I can say without doubt now that I believe in the absolute authority of God.

The thing for me to be careful of now, I guess, is not to see the demonic in everything, or to assume that every human problem is as a result of the demonic. Clearly in some cases it will be, but equally clearly in other places it won’t, and just because it was for me doesn’t mean that it will be for everyone.

The spirit shrieked, convulsed him violently and came out. The boy looked so much like a corpse that many said, He’s dead. But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him to his feet, and he stood up.

Mark 9:26-27

2004-11-20T22:15:00.000Z

It seems quite obvious that everything I’ve written here of late has been quite trivial. There’ve been updates, because I’ve got loads of really exciting stuff I want to say, but somehow I can’t get the words out. Either I can’t bring myself to write them yet, or the right ones are somewhere out of reach of my mind.

No more we doubt Thee, glorious Prince of life;

Life is naught without Thee; aid us in our strife;

Make us more than conqu’rors, through Thy deathless love:

Bring us safe through Jordan to Thy home above.

Thine be the glory, risen conqu’ring Son,

Endless is the vict’ry, Thou o’er death hast won.

Edmond Budry tr. Richard Hoyle

2004-11-18T23:52:00.000Z

I am fully aware that, yes, finding people who qualify as celebrities under the definition given last Wednesday probably wouldn't be all that hard. It would require, however, a knowledge of minor celebrities in obscure fields, of which blogging is just one of many. The definition of celebrity is very subjective, and we needed some way to quantify it. This seemed as good as any. If you think you qualify, make sure all ten sites mentioning you show up on a Google search for your name, then address your request for an invite to Martin. Bare in mind that anyone for whom there has been a deliberate attempt influence the result will not be accepted.

2004-11-17T23:59:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I decided to revisit the copy of Escape from Monkey Island that I’d had lying around for years. I finally finished it (for the first time), but I was a little disappointed—it didn’t quite do justice to the earlier games. I started looking around for what was going on in the adventure game genre today. The answer appears to be not much, but I did come across a game called The Longest Jouney, which sounds very interesting. I’ve not managed to find it on sale anywhere yet, but I thought this comment on developer Ragnar Tornquist’s blog was worth reposting. I can relate.

The web devours voraciously. Especially time. It eats time. Every day, millions of hours, consumed and stored inside its bloated maggot stomach. Some day the web-maggot will spew all those lifetimes, those endless oceans of time, out through its infinitely expanding anus, creating a wave that will wash across the universe like a Biblical flood, reverting everything to absolute zero, the beginning, the end...

Or maybe I just ought to spend less time online. It begins with honest research and it ends, bleary-eyed, with www.screenhead.com. At least TV was an honest time-eater. You plonked yourself down on the couch, you didn’t pretend you’d be working. I sit down with my coffee in the morning, boot up my PowerBook and Word, and five minutes later I’m neck deep in Ain’t-It-Cool-News getting annoyed with Talkbackers and trying to remember why there’s an empty Word document running in the background.

2004-11-10T13:20:00.000Z

Celebrity: One for whom a Google search on their name returns 10 or more individual third party web sites referring directly to them.

In November last year George Bush came to Britain to meet a few important people, and was met also by more than 100,000 protesters aiming to make him feel unwelcome. While I disapproved of Bush’s exploits in Iraq, I didn’t really like the tone of the protest and instead formulated a plan to invite him to dinner while he was in the country. I never got round to writing the letter, but I was reminded of the idea while watching the coverage of the US elections last week. I’m not sure exactly what happened next but, taking inspiration from Dave Gorman, there’s now a bet running in our house to prove that we can get 10 celebrities to come for a meal. The rules are as follows:

Celebrity will be defined as above. Any content created by the individual concerned won’t count. Neither will anything created with the deliberate intent of causing a current non-celebrity to meet the definition criteria. (Please don’t be tempted. This is important—there’s at least two pints riding on it.)
If a celebrity has more than one name then the total results for each name may be added together provided they each clearly refer to the same person.

2004-10-06T13:17:00.000+01:00

I feel like I should write something, but I’m not really sure what to say. The last couple of months have been absolutely amazing. I really want to share as much of it here as I can but, as I’ve once again been slack with the updating, I’m not sure I’ll manage very well. I really want to post here more often, but I also want to do a lot of work on both the underlying structure and the visual design. I struggle prioritising the changes and then I end up not making any of them. With a little help through prayer I’m trying to discipline myself a bit better and introduce some more order to my life, so hopefully I’ll get better.

Anyway; the last few months have included: Soul in the City, Greenbelt, Vocal Training, the start of Transform, and then this weekend—my first with Martin Scott’s Company Of Prophetic People. Mainly things that I’ve already mentioned at least in passing, but none of which I’ve really expanded on. Each of those things is really deserving of it’s own entry, some more than one, but to do that would take forever so I’ll try to summarise here.

Soul in the City was just amazing. I was on the prayer team for Week B at the Gilwell Park camp site so I wasn’t out on projects like the majority of those present. Instead I was part of a team of four with responsibility for the 24-7 prayer venue on-site. It was an awesome privilege to take prayer requests from the hundreds of young people on site every night, made even more exciting by the way they would return night after night to tell us how prayers had been answered. And as if that wasn’t enough we had youth leaders coming by with stories of how the prayer room was getting their groups excited about prayer for the first time.
Greenbelt is deserving of something more than the rant about the trains that I already posted. As always there was more going on than I could possibly cover. For whatever reason I didn’t seem to make it to that many bands this year. Obviously, I saw Delirious? and quite a few other acts were pretty good, but nothing that really made me think wow! The real highlights for me were in the speaker programme—specifically Stephen Sizer, who’s book on Christian Zionism I’ll definitely be buying once it’s published, and Shane Claiborne, of The Simple Way.
Somewhat disappointingly, I had to leave Vocal Training early, and even more so that meant that I missed the day of teaching on prayer entirely. For those who don’t know, Vocal Training is SPEAK’s summer training event. It was great to see so many people, and to reminisce about Greenbelt with those who had been there. As a result of both conversations held there and speakers heard there I have added yet more stuff to my Amazon wish list.
Transform: I’ll probably manage to write more about this at some point over the next year, as it is going to be dominating my life. So far it’s been amazing, so good in fact that it was actually worth leaving Vocal Training for! It seems much longer, but we started exactly one month ago with a week away, staying at Westwood Christian Centre up in the hills near Huddersfield. The venue was beautiful, the weather was fantastic, and the teaching what I’d waited two years to hear. There are eight of us on the course from both Leeds and Bradford, with placements on a variety of projects in both cities. The longer it goes on the more I realise how little I know of the city in which I have lived for the past four years.
Company of Prophetic People is a training course in the prophetic which I am taking as part of my placement time on Transform. On Saturday afternoon I had my life described to me by three people who I’d just met. I feel I should have something really profound to say about my experiences over the weekend, but I can’t explain them. I’ll be doing this for the next year, so hopefully by the end I’ll have managed to put some words to the excited feeling.

2004-10-05T01:10:00.000+01:00

It’s that time of the week again when I send out prayer requests to the SPEAK Network. I’ve been a bit slack with them of late, and even more so with posting them here, but here are the two requests I’ve received for the week of 4^th October:

For the Big Dress campaign:
- Sharon and Hannah from the Network Support Team are about to write to some celebrities who they hope will want to support the Big Dress campaign. Pray that they will be able to clearly and concisely explain the Big Dress and how it relates to trade justice, and that the celebs will want to get involved and support what we are doing.
- Letters will also soon be going out to the network and loudspeakers to ask for donations for the Big Dress. Please pray that these will be well received, and that people will be generous with their money. Please also pray for other avenues of funding that are currently being pursued, including applications to outside organisations.
- Please pray that someone would want to take on the role of Big Dress Tour co-ordinator when the Big Dress goes on tour round the UK and further afield.
The new SPEAK mailing should have been dispatched at the weekend but wasn’t quite completed. Pray for the Norwich group: that they manage to get it packed soon and that God would be with them, and that they would enjoy their time together stuffing envelopes. Thank God for their willingness to serve the network in this way, and pray that He blesses them.

The intention of the SPEAK prayer e-mail list is to enable people from across the Network, and groups in particular, to support each other in prayer. If you’d like to sign up, or if you're a member of a SPEAK group that you think should be represented then please drop me an e-mail. Prayer requests for next week by Monday (11^th) evening please. It’d be really great to hear what some groups have planned for this term.

2004-09-22T21:30:00.000+01:00

2004-09-01T23:55:00.000+01:00

Dear Sir Richard,

Thankfully I don’t have to travel on your trains very often, but every time I do I can’t help but feel sorry for those that use them regularly. Last Friday I travelled out from Leeds on the 11:10 to Cheltenham Spa and returned yesterday on the 11:12 from Cheltenham to Leeds. Whilst neither train was late, I can honestly say that your Virgin Voyager trains are easily amongst the worst designed pieces of engineering I’ve ever had the misfortune to use.

First off, the trains are far too short. How anyone ever thought that four carriage trains would be adequate on busy Intercity routes formally served by 125s is quite beyond me. There simply isn’t enough space, either seated our standing, and this problem is further emphasised by the plethora of other design faults.

Secondly, the onboard information systems are just useless. Most of us are used to a system of information on paper tickets and notices replaced after each journey, but you have done away with that in favour of an entirely electronic system. One of the major benefits of indicating seat reservations with tickets in the seat backs is that one can instantly tell at a glance from either the platform or vestibules whether there are any free seats in a given carriage. Using your digital displays one must examine the screen above each and every seat individually. Your end of carriage displays vary constantly, but never appear to show what one wants at any given moment. You have scrapped the paper notices indicating train routes, and there isn’t even a toilet availability indicator like those found on older trains. I recommend fitting large colour coded lights to the seat backs (red for reserved, green for available) and large clear signs indicating the coach letter, leaving the displays free to show route information. Oh, and why, oh why, are your carriages numbered A, C, D and F?

Finally, despite having spacious toilets, the remainder of the Voyager train feels unusually cramped. The aisle between the seats appears narrow. There is very little leg room. Seat backs feel steep and the table appears too low, yet there still isn’t room for a soft drink bottle from your shop to fit in the cup holder without hitting the back of the seat in front. Overhead luggage racks are too small for anything more than the smallest of bags. There’s barely space to move in the shop, let alone space for a queue, and anyone queuing through a doorway will find the doors constantly closing on them. And I’ve never managed to use the at seat audio, as the controller is just too awkward to use when sat next to a stranger. I don’t understand quite how, but the corridors between coaches feel even more cramped when standing than on the old slam-door trains still operating around my parent’s home on the line out of Charing Cross. I think it has something to do with their being less doors and an almost total lack of either natural light or fresh air.

I hope you find this constructive, but for the meantime I would be prepared to take a longer journey where possible rather than suffer the ordeal of these trains again.

2004-08-27T02:29:00.001+01:00

It seems that some spammer has started spoofing this domain in the from fields of the junk he’s sending out. In 24 hours I’ve received over 1000 bounce messages from addresses I didn’t write to returning messages promoting various erectile remedies. If you were the unfortunate recipient of one of these messages, then I’m sorry, but it’s nothing to do with me. Annoyingly, this also means I’ve had to remove the default e-mail alias on sphericalbowl.co.uk, so if you want to e-mail me you must now use only the james address at this domain, or your message will likely be bounced.

I’m off to Greenbelt in the morning, so they’ll be no updates over the weekend (not that I imagine you were expecting any anyway).

2004-08-26T01:57:00.000+01:00

I have a long list near my computer of interesting topics I would like to write about, and a few vague ideas about what I want to say. Recent experiences, world events, social commentary, that sort of thing. All of those, though, are far too difficult to write about, and make maintaining this site seem a bit too much like real work. It’s far easier just to make trivial observances every couple of weeks. So, I’m sorry to those of you who might be expecting something worthwhile—maybe I’ll get to it eventually. In the meantime, here are some thoughts about a few films I’ve seen recently:

First up: I, Robot. Of those of you that know me, many will have heard me complaining at great length about this film in recent months. I take it all back. While it’s no cinematic masterpiece and there are boring moments, it is entertaining and it’s not the offence to the memory of Isaac Asimov that I had expected. Asimov’s robot stories date from a time before microprocessors, and before widespread knowledge of the realities of computing. Asimov’s robots are genuine thinking machines, not programmable computers who can do only what they are told. In writing an updated story for a twenty-first century audience the film makers have altered the few things that now appear inaccurate in Asimov’s future vision. The biggest change, and the one with the greatest potential for offence, is the sacrifice of something Asimov portrayed as benevolent to modern paranoia for the sake of a more dramatic plot. However, despite these differences, the film does owe more than I had expected to the book, and the robot code names introduced at the start of the film will immediately tell those who know the book what kind of territory we’re in.
Stigmata: This film I did find to be offensive, though I don’t know enough about the issues it attempts to cover to comment on it in great detail. I’ll be adding them to the list I mentioned earlier for possible exploration in the future. I know it’s not theologically sound and, despite not being a Catholic, I didn’t like the way it presented itself uncovering the truth about some kind of genuine conspiracy.
And finally, The Village: This one I actually liked. In my opinion it’s far and away M Night Shyamalan’s greatest work to date, though a quick glance over the IMDB message boards shows that not everyone agrees with me. It has been said by many that Shyamalan’s recent work is cursed by the success of The Sixth Sense, which has left millions of viewers playing guess the hoodwink rather than enjoying his films. The Village has definitely been a victim of this, which is a shame as Shyamlan’s filmmaking has matured immeasurably in the last five years. Whereas the whole appeal of The Sixth Sense hung on those last few minutes, The Village is a complete film with a story to tell rather than just a surprise to hit you with at the end. It seems there are almost as many interpretations of what the film is about as there are viewers, but to me it was a beautiful tale of loss of innocence. That moment in all our lives when we discover for ourselves the truths in the legends our parents taught us. If I’ve a criticism it’s that for what seems like a religious community we know surprisingly little about their beliefs or the part they play in village life. Really, though, I’m nit-picking and if you can put aside your pre conceptions I guarantee you’ll love this film.

2004-08-11T02:35:00.000+01:00

After something of a last minute decision, I’ve spent the last week at Soul in the City. Hopefully I’ll have something to say about it soon, once I’ve managed to collect my thoughts, but for the moment, here are this week’s SPEAK prayer requests:

Pray for the big dress campaign:
- Pray for financial provision for the campaign. £15,000 is needed for an inflatable frame to give the dress shape and allowing it to be easily transported and erected.
- For members of the Network Support Team who will be giving interviews to BBC local radio stations. Praise God for the opportunity, and ask that He will speak though them and that it will open up further opportunities for coverage for local groups and the dress.
Continue to pray for Vocal Training. Numbers are currently too low, and the Network Support Team need to decide whether to cancel. Whether or not the event goes ahead, there will be a financial loss, which SPEAK cannot afford. Pray for God’s provision.
Pray for wisdom and guidance for Zanna and Louise from the Network Support Team who will be attending a festival in Holland this weekend to talk about SPEAK and what’s going on in the UK. Pray that this will open up new opportunities there.
Pray for Rik, who’s trying to start a SPEAK group in Lancaster. Ask that God will provide a few committed and enthusiastic people to work with him.

2004-07-20T22:12:00.000+01:00

I did something silly. They did just slash the prices though. Here’s hoping they can keep up with demand this time…

2004-07-15T03:40:00.000+01:00

Thank you to everyone who sent me positive feedback on the first SPEAK prayer e-mail last week. I’d been hoping that over time we would begin to see prayers answered and that reporting them in subsequent e-mails would be an encouragement to the whole Network. Amazingly, there’re successes to report already!

Prayer points for this week:

Praise God for the successes in preparing for Soul in the City. Some of the Network Support Team prayed that the first people they phoned would have the stuff they needed, and they did! Continue to pray that everything else will come together as Zanna, who’s been organising it, is going on holiday.
Pray for an administrator to work in the Network Support Team. They urgently need someone with the passion and the skills to start as soon as possible.
Pray for SPEAK’s financial situation—they're struggling a bit just now.
Pray for people to go to Vocal Training, God especially, but also people in the network. The speakers are amazing and have much to teach us.

2004-07-08T03:06:00.000+01:00

At the SPEAK Flower Model event back in April I volunteered to co-ordinate a Network Prayer E-mail that would go to strategic people in the network every week. I’ve finally managed to get my act together enough to send something out, but it’s now July—not the best time for student groups. The plan is to run on a test basis until September, and then go for a full launch, sending this to SPEAK groups up and down the country. Anyway, here are this week’s prayer points:

Vocal Training, September 3^rd-7^th, that it will be a key time of inspiration and information for the network.
Summer Festivals, for the stalls telling people about SPEAK.
SPEAK has just been asked to run a prayer walk and repentance service as part of Soul Survivor’s London Soul in the City event. It’ll be running 7-9pm in on 27^th July and 3^rd August with up to 1,000 young people.
- Thank and Praise God for this amazing opportunity for SPEAK to have a huge impact upon the next generation.
- Pray that the young people would hear and be able to discern what God thinks and feels about the injustices caused by the arms trade, debt and world trade; that they would be stirred to act.
- Pray for the logistics of the event: For a good relationship with the police who need to be contacted about having a service in Trafalgar square and that Trafalgar Square would be available to use for the service; for the timing of the whole event, moving 1000 people around 3 prayer stations; that many people will volunteer to help steward; that a sound system and globes will be provided; that we will find a photographer to photograph the repentance service to hand to a government leader.
- Pray for strength and peace for all those working on this event, as time is short.

2004-07-07T02:21:00.000+01:00

OK, first off it seems that I once again find myself in the position of having to apologise for the infrequent updates. Sorry about that.

Secondly, I’ve thus far resisted the temptation to post the above button on this site; partly because it wasn’t something I really saw as within the site’s scope, and partly because the fact that I believe in the BBC more than most other media organisations doesn’t really warrant the phrase I believe in the BBC standing on it’s own. However, it seems that the government have hired yet another blairite Murdoch crony with no clue about new media to try and tear the corporation down. This time I have to say something.

The Graf Report was commissioned by Tessa Jowell in August of 2003, just over a month after the death of David Kelly, and a matter of weeks after the opening of the Hutton Inquiry. The author, Philip Graf, was Chief Executive of Trinity Mirror until 2002. BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas reports that Graf’s report pleases almost all, and then goes on to cite Hugo Drayton and the British Internet Publishers Alliance. The BIPA is an alliance of some of the largest old media conglomerates who’s sole objective for the last six years has been to attack the BBC’s online dominance, with little regard for the clear fact that the BBC leads because of the superiority of it’s content. Hugo Drayton, for example, is from the Telegraph Group. Other BIPA members include Capital Radio, EMAP, Guardian Unlimited, Independent Digital, News International and Trinity Mirror. Unsurprisingly, where they’ve even bothered to cover it, Graf’s report has received a resounding welcome from the whole of the mainstream British press—and the greatest praise comes from a political lobby group who for three years worked on Graf's behalf!

The Independent reports that the BBC web site is now used by a quarter of the adult population of the UK, and also that Simon Waldman, director of Guardian Unlimited, had been hoping for a rather more drastic response from the BBC. There is no specification of exactly what he would have liked, but unsurprisingly (again) there are hints that a dramatic slashing of the Beeb’s online presence and a fair number of redundancies would have been considered a good place to start. Guardian Unlimited is the ninth most popular web site in the UK. bbc.co.uk, I think, is the first.

Does Graf’s report please almost all? It seems to me that, like Hutton before it, Graf pleases everyone bar the licence fee payer. We know that the vast majority of web traffic is over web sites owned by only a handful of companies, and don’t get me wrong, that’s something I’d like to see change. Once upon a time there was a dream that web would bring true freedom of speech, unhindered by the bias of trans-national corporations. Make today a day for independent web sites.

2004-05-18T17:09:00.000+01:00

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.

2004-05-12T01:35:00.000+01:00

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.

2004-05-10T23:53:00.000+01:00

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.

2004-05-05T23:56:00.000+01:00

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.

2004-04-29T23:59:00.000+01:00

The other night at cell group we were having a bit of a chat about worship music, what it is, and what we liked. That was something of a sidetrack as the Bible study had been on Romans 1, looking at how Paul explains the gospel, and how we are bought to salvation.

When I came in I put on U2’s Achtung Baby from the point where I had paused it on the way out; I was totally struck by the words to The Fly. It’s pretty amazing, especially considering it’s from the album which often considered the point where their work started to become less Christian in it’s influence.

It’s no secret that the stars are falling from the sky

It’s no secret that our world is in darkness tonight

They say the sun is sometimes eclipsed by a moon

Y’know I don’t see you when she walks in the room

It’s no secret that a friend is someone who lets you help

It’s no secret that a liar won’t believe anyone else

They say a secret is something you tell one other person

So I’m telling you… child

Low Voice

A man will beg

A man will crawl

On the sheer face of love

Like a fly on a wall

It’s no secret at all

Gospel Voice

Love, we shine like a

Burning star

We’re falling from

The sky… tonight

It’s no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest

It’s no secret ambition bites the nails of success

Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief

All kill their inspiration and sing about the grief

Low Voice

A man will rise

A man will fall

From the sheer face of love

Like a fly from a wall

It’s no secret at all

Gospel Voice

Love… we shine like a

Burning star

We’re falling from

The sky… tonight

Oh yeah

It’s no secret that the stars are falling from the sky

The universe exploded ’cosa one man’s lie

Look I gotta go

Yeah I’m running outta change

There’s a lot of things

If I could I’d rearrange

Now, it’s clearly not worship music, in the traditional sense. But at the time I found it pretty amazing.

2004-04-27T23:38:00.000+01:00

It’s not often I can say this, but I live in a truly beautiful area (even if it does rain a lot).

2004-04-26T01:38:00.000+01:00

Again I find myself apologising for the infrequent updates. Sorry. I’ve made a couple of attempts at drafting articles, but I can’t seem to come up with anything that doesn’t read like a rant. I’ve spent the last two weekends at an Intercessors For Britain Prayer and Bible weekend and then a SPEAK Flower Model weekend: an interesting combination. I’m also making a third attempt at reading Tom Sine’s Mustard Seed Verses McWorld. Broadly speaking, the result is that I’m terrified. Where I thought I understood, I’m now confused. Where I was confident, I’m now uncertain.

I’ve always positioned myself in a place liberals consider conservative evangelical, but conservatives consider liberal. In secular circles most would probably put me somewhere left of centre, provided I keep my mouth shut when discussing certain issues. I’ve always been happy with that position. It’s let me stay out of traditional stereotypes, and anyway, surely it’s better to take God’s ideological position than a worldly one that takes a few of His values and compromises many others. It’s beginning to hit me, though, that such a position doesn’t really lend itself well to building strong relationships.

Of my friends; I consider some too right wing, some too liberal, most just too apathetic. Very few seem to be in that place of wanting to truly give God everything, and even less actually having the courage to go through with it. I don’t seek to blame God for my own inadequacies. I know already that the Christian must forsake all family and friends and daily take up his cross, but that doesn’t make the prospect any less frightening.

To make matters even harder, self sacrifice alone is not enough. In this place where I agree with no-one and in which I must seek to live entirely opposed to modern culture, I must also consider others as more important than myself, and keep love for those same forsaken family and friends absolutely central. Beyond even that, I must love my neighbour irrespective of prior relationship, or such week political divisions as mentioned earlier.

Now how does that work?

2004-03-26T01:04:00.000Z

You know how sometimes you hear about violent films, then you see them and they’re not really that bad? The Passion of the Christ isn’t one of those films. I don’t really know what I could say that’s not been said by a thousand people already. I could probably pick holes in the theology, and there’s certainly some imagery I didn’t understand, but as films about Christ go it’s about the best I’ve seen. See it, make up your own mind, and then if it impacts you, maybe it’s a sign God wants you to do something more worthwhile than buy cheep tat.

Anyway, a few observations. You might not want to read them if you’ve not yet seen the film. Before I start; to say again that The Passion is easily the most accurate and powerful film of this you’re ever likely to see. With the exception of my third point these are all merely observations rather than criticisms.

Is the woman caught in adultery generally thought to be Mary Magdalene? Have I missed that in the gospels somewhere?
You can’t call this anti-Semitic without calling the gospels themselves anti-Semitic. From some quarters, maybe that was the point.
There’s some quite blatant idolisation of Mary going on in this film. Given that there are a fair few moments which seem to come from Catholic tradition rather than scripture, that’s not entirely surprising. But Gibson seemed to be trying to be trying to explain away the clear Biblical evidence that Jesus had biological brothers.
I was somewhat unnerved by some of the Satan imagery. I accept that could have been the idea, but I would have liked to have understood it. I’m thinking particularly of the bizarre child thing he’s holding in the crowd, and of the thing that growls at Judas after Jesus falls over the wall.
The film’s strong point is definitely in the main narrative. The flashbacks revert to your more traditional cheesy Jesus style.
What’s with the Jesus invented tables thing?

2004-03-21T16:43:00.000Z

It’s taken me a few weeks to make something I wanted to publish out of this, so you’ll have to forgive the use of some now rather outdated references. Sorry about that.

About five years ago I went to Bristol for the annual Methodist Youth Conference. I only ever went the once, but apparently it’s quite a highly respected body if you move in certain circles. From what I can gather that’s mostly people who, for all their talk of ecumenism, are quite precious about denominational preservation. One issue that historically divides denominations is that of baptism and thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, it featured quite prominently on the youth conference agenda.

Recently Thomas has been stirring up interdenominational debate on Dan’s housemate James’s blog; Catholic and Loving It. One of the things he’s been asking is whether or not he should get baptised, and James has (quite rightly) been encouraging him. When I first started thinking about this post, I was ready to point out that while Jesus instructs his disciples to baptise in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, he never says you must be baptised in the same way that he says you must be born again. Since that time I posted a long passage from Hebrews, including chapter 10, verse 22 which makes the importance of baptism quite clear.

Ultimately, it is the question of whether I should be baptised that bothers me more. This can be argued two ways:

My infant baptism wasn’t biblical and therefore doesn’t count. I should do it again.
I was baptised as an infant and therefore do not need to do it again. It may even be wrong to do so.

This was the issue debated by Methodist Youth Conference. From memory, the argument mainly came from the line in the Nicene Creed stating I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins, placing a great deal of emphasis on the word one. To argue such a hard line from only a non-biblical source, particularly one so vague, seems a little odd. The Nicene Creed however, was written at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, possibly predating the canonisation of scripture. The question of how the Biblical canon was drawn up is something that has always interested me, now more than ever after reading Manifesto for a Revolution, and one to which I have never been able to find a satisfactory answer.

Assuming that we take the Bible to be the only authority on the matter, then I don’t believe second baptism is ever expressly forbidden, though it is quite obvious that it shouldn’t be necessary. If though, as is hinted at several times (1,2,3), it is not possible to be saved unless we have confessed and been baptised in water and the spirit in that order, then I have a problem. I do need to be baptised, and it wouldn’t be for the second time, as the first didn’t really count.

Both the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession of Faith, two confessions from fairly close to the time of the reformation, retain infant baptism as a sacrament of the church. By my interpretation their sole reason for doing so is that the child of one that is saved by grace is presumed saved, much as a child of Adam is presumed fallen—a principle which I don’t believe can be said to stand up either biblically or evidentially.

So after all that I’m no closer to an answer, though I do know that should I ever have children they won’t be baptised as babies.

2004-03-20T23:53:00.000Z

There are 27,000 registered heroin addicts in Bradford. I’m beginning to get a sense of why God might have called me here. Maybe I’ll have more to say when that’s had some time to sink in.

2004-03-16T19:04:00.000Z

There’s been a lot written about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, both by those who’ve seen it and by those who haven’t. I’m going to hold off until I have, but this article from the Guardian is a little light relief from what most are saying.

2004-03-15T03:26:00.000Z

I read this this-morning and found it quite encouraging:

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, It is mine to avenge; I will repay, and again, The Lord will judge his people. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated. You sympathised with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.

So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. For in just a very little while,

He who is coming will come and will not delay.

But my righteous one will live by faith.

And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him.

But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved.

Hebrews (NIV)

2004-03-07T18:33:00.000Z

I’ve spent the weekend playing in the intermural—a competition of ten teams playing ten different sports over two days. I don’t play sport. I had to buy some trainers especially (something I didn’t want to do, as they’re now not expecting to ship the Blackspot until September). I ache.

The other thing I just had to mention was this quote from a Union Councillor in Thursday’s meeting. I was so amazed I wrote it down word for word:

Can you imagine the Union losing the license to run the FND in the Basement? That would be the most horrible thing in the world!

Union Council, 04/03/2004

2004-02-26T03:24:00.000Z

For about a year now I’ve been helping out at an event called Real Hope at Sunbridge Road Mission. Every week there’s a free meal put on for all those that need it, with the ability to provide clothes, shoes, bedding and other necessitates when required. And every week a speaker come in and preaches, sings or gives a testimony. I’ve heard some incredible speakers over time, and the relationships the Real Hope staff have built up are amazing, but tonight really beat them all. At the end of his talk the speaker asked who wanted to turn their lives around by making a commitment to Christ, and between six and nine people (everyone seemed to count a different number) put their hands up.

It’d be really cool if anyone can spare some time to pray for these people—particularly one girl who I gave a Bible to and who was planning to check into a rehab tomorrow. Pray they will all overcome their various addictions and problems, and that they will get the discipleship they’re going to need. And pray that this girl (obviously can’t mention names online) will call the rehab and have no problems in getting there, and that she will read the Bible with God’s guidance.

2004-02-24T23:57:00.000Z

A few thoughts on top-up fees:

Firstly, according to Universities UK there is a funding gap of £8.7 billion between that which will be raised by top-up fees and that which is required because despite increased investment in the last couple of years, academics were still under-paid (Source: BBC). It seems clear to me that the only reason UUK would support a bill which they know can not solve their problem is because they believe they will later be able to remove the fee cap, either at committee stage in parliament, or fairly soon after it becomes law.
Secondly, the argument that paying for higher education out of general taxation would be unfair is an entirely false one. No-one (with the possible exception of the Liberal Democrats, who have advocated a penny on income tax for education for as long as I can remember) is suggesting that there be an increase in basic rate of taxation to fund universities. Instead, the suggestion is that there be a higher top rate of income tax on any amount earned over £100,000 a year (66% of Labour party members’ preferred method of generating public sector funding, according to a survey for this morning’s Guardian). If we follow the logic that students go on to be rich and should therefore pay, then £100,000 seems a better threshold on which to proclaim someone rich than £15,000, don’t you think? The problem here, of course, is that it’s no longer the poor and the uneducated who would face the unfair burden, but the rich and the powerful and the people who had their education for free. People like Tony Blair, in fact. I don’t know the statistics for the number of people earning over £100,000 who hold degrees, but I suspect it’s close to 90%. And I suspect the majority of the remaining 10% employ or otherwise depend on people who hold degrees. It’s a fairly basic principle of taxation that you take from people who have benefited or will benefit in order to fund those who are benefiting.
Thirdly, while it is true that the 50% in higher education target does seem to have been plucked from thin air, that is not cause to start closing universities. Everyone with the ability for a higher education ought to be able to get one, and get one without fear of a lifetime of debt. If that means 50%, it means 50%. If it means 100%, so be it. I’m not sure that would be practical just at the moment, but there was a time not long ago when people would have said the same of primary and secondary education. Some say times have changed and we can no longer expect the government to pay for higher education. We wouldn’t accept that argument for primary and secondary education, why should HE be any different? Our times are what we make them, and if we keep going this way we are moving backward, not forward. It’s also worth noting that William Edward Forster, largely responsible for getting education for all, was a Bradford MP.
Fourthly, regarding the suggestion that education be funded from cuts to the defence budget; no-one is advocating losing the military—much as I might find the idea appealing. UBU submitted a motion to NUS conference which suggested reducing military spending to the European NATO average, saving £3.5 billion. We could save the best part of half a billion right away by ending government subsidies to the arms trade—an area which accounts for 3-4% of the British economy and yet is the second most heavily subsidised area after agriculture.

2004-02-20T09:31:00.000Z

A few quick links:

The lent blog of Andii Bowsher—he’s been publicising it with messages to the bucu mailing list, which I’m sure is cheating. It could be called spam, or it could just be part of being a chaplain to the students. I’m not sure.
Neil Turner, who worked out who I am the other day. He’s, like, a proper blogger. I feel privileged.
Something about pink ear muffs, by Nina Carter-Brown. I’m not sure I really understand.

I’m off to Soundcheck very shortly. This is good, partly because it always is, and partly because it means I can’t post anything I shouldn’t about elections for at least four more days. If you can get to London on Monday, do come on the Day of Action against the arms trade. The SPEAK web site has all the details.

2004-02-18T23:53:00.000Z

Father, you know that I’m facing a hard few weeks. I’m sure that the choices I have taken recently have been the right ones. Keep me full of faith, and don’t let me regret choosing the path to which you have called me. I’ve told everyone I’ll be fine but I know that’s only in your strength, for I am nothing. Help me get my job done. Don’t ever let me be concerned about my legacy. Above all don’t let me for one moment lose site of you, or spend less time with you in what will undoubtedly be a busy time.

The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.

Acts 5 (NIV)

2004-02-14T23:47:00.000Z

For a couple of days a few weeks ago (some time in late January) I was considering re-naming this blog twenty-something single Christian. I drafted a post expressing something of what I was feeling at the time. It was never published, partly because I re-read it and was horrified by my bitter, self-indulgent whinging, and partly because it was really badly written. Now though, it seems that yet more of my friends could soon be pairing off, and the temptation to break from what I wrote before Christmas is ever greater.

It’s hard to keep your heart in the right place when it seems everyone you know is encouraging you to put it elsewhere. Apparently if I don’t I’ll always be thinking what if? It’s probably true—they weren’t far off last time. In the perfect world of my dreams, however, my ideal woman is the one with whom I have a joint calling. And I’d rather think what if? in one year than what if I’d stuck with that calling to Bradford? in ten.

2004-02-10T18:42:00.000Z

I’ve been reading Manifesto for a Revolution by Alex Robertson; a look at the doctrine of the Kingdom of God and what it means, mainly through the parables of Matthew 13. So far I’ve found some parts wonderfully exciting, and others quite challenging. I’ve been trying to keep a list of all the questions it throws up as I read, partly so I’ll know whether they’ve been answered when I get to the end, and partly because I’d really quite like to talk/pray some of them through with other people. The biggest one at the point where I am now revolves around the Council of Nicaea, the conversion of Constantine, and the composition and inerrancy of scripture. Typing conversion of Constantine into Google led me to an interesting article on church history, but didn’t really provide any answers. I guess I should just try and finish the book.

2004-02-09T00:54:00.000Z

I’m trying to fill in an application form for a programme called Transform:City. It describes itself as equipping God’s people in transforming Bradford and Leeds. The information pack that I’ve been given talks about equipping trainees to fulfil their part in God's plans, obviously with a specifically Bradford and Leeds focus. Given the vision God has given me for Bradford, and given how unprepared I often feel for that, it seems pretty much an ideal way of spending next year. It’s also run and supported by a bunch people for whom I have a very great deal of respect. I know I need to step out in faith and start living the life, but this seems the kind of guidance on setting out that I’ve spend the last two years looking for. The verse I posted on January 25^th is particularly relevant.

First of all, though, I need to get through this form. I’d expected something quite simple. My details, and maybe a couple of questions on why I wanted to do it. Instead, there are a whole stack of questions like what do you think God might be calling you to in the long term?, describe your relationship with God at the moment and please mark any level of involvement in alcohol, drugs, pornography, homosexual and heterosexual activity or the occult. I want to be honest, but I think it’s going to take a few drafts before I dare put a pen near the actual form.

2004-02-08T01:55:00.000Z

Life is Beautiful. But it’s also cruel. And just when you think it’s all going well it shoots you in the back. Vicious—but the beauty always comes out top in the end.

2004-02-03T23:48:00.000Z

Last week I was trying to figure out some of the key places to take my parents on tour of Bradford. I didn’t really know where to go as there’s not much to see. The old Wool Exchange was about the only place that sprang immediately to mind; a beautiful building, and a symbol of Bradford’s past riches, now a bookshop with a built in Starbucks. Once we were actually walking round the town, though, there was always something else to see. Bradford’s no longer just some place I studied. It’s been my life for three and a half years and God’s got plans for me here. Yet still I hardly know the place.

For three years I’ve thought that all the interesting parts of Bradford were demolished long ago; that the fact there are really only two shopping streets is a result of a history of bad planning decisions. While this is undoubtedly partially true, I realised on Saturday that there are plenty of curious back streets and interesting alleyways still standing. Between all the leisure arcades and pound stores there’s even the occasional interesting shop. With a little effort Bradford could be a great place to live.

2004-02-02T15:51:00.000Z

Richard has re-built the Ian Hislop for Director General site as a Wiki. Head over to the With Us page and add your support. If you’ve not used a Wiki before, just click the EditText link at the bottom of the page and add your name/link in the same format as everyone else.

2004-01-31T12:40:00.000Z

Having watched Question Time on Thursday, I would like to add my voice to the Ian Hislop For Director General campaign. I’m not altogether sure I’d want him there, but I can’t think of anyone better, and the campaign could be fun.

I’ve also decided that should I ever actually get round to switching to a more advanced blogging tool, it won’t be Pivot. Blogger is great because of it’s easy update anywhere functionality. Pivot doesn’t appear to work with IE5/Win and, as someone who’s been stuck on Windows 95 for the last week and a half, I’d find that somewhat frustrating.

2004-01-30T19:40:00.000Z

I was at the second of the CU’s new Brink events last night and I picked up a flyer for UCCF’s Life project. It quoted the New Living Translation of John 3:18, which I’d never seen before. I was somewhat surprised as it seemed somewhat different from the NIV, and to directly contradict 2 Corinthians 5:10, and I’d always thought of UCCF as an organisation of reasonably sound theology. Cross referencing with Bible Gateway, though, it seems that it’s a fairly common interpretation… Just something I thought was interesting.

2004-01-27T23:51:00.000Z

I can’t decide whether Lost in Translation is beautiful but sad, or sad but beautiful. Either way it’s the funniest film I’ve seen with Anna Faris in it.

2004-01-25T17:37:00.000Z

A few people recently have asked me why Bradford? Every time I’ve started with the story of how I wanted to go to Bournemouth and study computer animation, how I didn’t get in, how I took a year out to apply again, how I nearly went to Cumbria College of Art, how I was attracted by the more diverse course here and how Simon persuaded me that Bradford was a good place to be. A string of coincidence and bad judgement.

Of course, in reality, that had nothing to do with it. God bought me here because he had plans for me, and I realise that now. It sounds so much more exciting that way. Perhaps I should think about the way I tell my story.

For the present, I’m staying right here in Ephesus. A huge door of opportunity for good work has opened up here. (There is also mushrooming opposition.)

1 Corinthians 16:8-9 (The Message)

2004-01-24T23:56:00.000Z

If I’m terrified of jellyfish, does that mean I should dive into infested waters?

2004-01-19T14:10:00.000Z

I’ve been trying to think of things I might like to do next year if I don’t re-stand. So far I’ve come up with two ideas:

Receive, and put to good use, giftings in prophecy and intercession so that I might be used by God to speak His will for Bradford into fruition,
Feed the hungry, give drinks to the thirsty, invite strangers into my home, clothe the naked, care for the sick and visit those in prison.

Preferably I’d like to do both.

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

your old men will dream dreams,

your young men will see visions.
Joel 2:28

2004-01-18T20:59:00.000Z

OK, apart from a few issues with the style sheet, I think I’ve fixed everything I broke in yesterday’s reorganisation. I know I promised an update to the amd FAQ last June but, to be honest it's not something I really have time for anymore.

I want to try and get at least some of the remaining problems dealt with tonight, but in the meantime the IRC Bible and the Brick Testament are a couple of interesting Bible “translations” that I don’t think I’ve linked to before.

2004-01-16T00:24:00.000Z

So I should have thought of putting this up here when I first got it last week…

Will you take the day off on Monday 23 February this year and come to central London for SPEAK’s annual Day of Action?

We are mobilising people to pray and campaign for an end to government support and promotion of the arms trade. The day will include a rally, a procession and a huge symbolic prayer action outside the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO). This is a government agency in the Ministry of Defence responsible for marketing and promoting UK arms exports overseas on behalf of companies. DESO often pushes arms sales in extremely volatile situations and to countries engaged in bloody conflict, such as India and Pakistan. All this comes at cost to the taxpayer of £16 million every year!

Our aim is to have 600 people there to match the number of people employed worldwide by DESO. For the prayer action we will be kneeling in a makeshift war trench to pray and stand in the gap on behalf of the land and repent of the bloodshed caused by UK arms exports (Ezekiel 22v 30). We see this as the perfect opportunity to put SPEAK’s radical ethos into practice and combine campaigning, prayer, sharing our hope in Jesus, and repentance for our nation’s sins.

We want to model a different way of campaigning that comes out of hearts of love for Jesus and others, be they victims of British arms exports, or DESO employees. Together we can bring a clear and powerful message of peace to our government, the public and the media, that we do not want our taxes to be spent helping DESO to fuel conflict worldwide.

It promises to be an exciting and creative prophetic action. Please book the day off now if you can! What would be even more amazing is if you could invite some friends - just forward this e-mail on. We need lots of help from God and you to get 600 people along, so let us know if you can help mobilise more people.

When? Monday 23 February, 9.45am - 4pm

Where? Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 235 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2.

How? Pledge to be there on the website, or by contacting Beccie (020 7249 4309; beccie@speak.org.uk). You’ll need a packed lunch and to wear black clothes for the procession.

More information www.speak.org.uk

Thanks so much for thinking and praying about this. I really hope that you can be there.

God bless

PS - SPEAK’s annual gathering, Soundcheck, exploring God’s heart for justice is happening the weekend before this (20-22 February 2004) in London. It’s always an inspiring time and it would be great to see you there as well.

Landslides happen when small stones start to move - David Alton

2004-01-14T01:16:00.000Z

A friend has leant me some CDs of music by Keith Green. I’d never heard of him before, but it made me smile. I wasn’t quite prepared for the joyfulness of it.

A quick google for information on him led me to an article by his wife. It’s not an issue I’d ever given much thought to before, and it certainly didn’t make me smile, but it seemed worth linking to anyway.

When?	Monday 23 February, 9.45am - 4pm
Where?	Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 235 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2.
How?	Pledge to be there on the website, or by contacting Beccie (020 7249 4309; beccie@speak.org.uk). You’ll need a packed lunch and to wear black clothes for the procession.
More information	www.speak.org.uk