It’s Lovely down in the woods today

Best days off take me out of myself with the nearest and dearest — so a gloriously sunny Saturday was spent together at Alton Towers. It’s weird not having any aviation noise, though. I hadn’t realised how ubiquitous aviation was until it was no more, and life must be especially weird around Heathrow. Currently the Eyjafjallajökull volcano (try saying that when you’ve had a few) still seems to be winning.

Our younger family members are more into theme parks perhaps than me, but with hearts high we headed for Britain’s largest Theme Park, Alton Towers — Rural Staffordshire and pity the neighbours — and the newly opened Th13teen.
This has been billed as the “Ultimate Rollercoaster” “Never has so much theme park technology been combined in one fantastically thrilling ride,” gushed the blurb, backed by late night TV advertising.

For an hour and a half we waited in line.
Tension built slowly, as portentious organ music swelled, a bit like Church. Meanwhile, a nubile soloist languidly sang lines from The Teddy Bears Picnic in a minor key (I kid you not). Then she counted slowly up to Thirteen (geddit?) in a dusky sotto voce that the unordained might associate with dirty phonecalls.
Thank the Lord for Amazon Kindle on the iPhone. Then...

Actually, I hate to say it — Th13teen was OK but, perhaps, just a tad lame. There was a substantial but not major iggly wiggly rollercoaster through the woods, with only a lap bar, then a hi-tech bit in a tomb thingie with a few jerks and screams and some laser stuff, then you whizz backwards in the dark for 10 seconds or so. Fair enough, but Lord knows why it all cost £15 million. Perhaps I lack imagination, or 20+ years of being a vicar have insulated me against screams and plastic bats. I did like the wraiths, though — kind of sackcloth dirty old monks. If they sold the outfits in the gift shop I might have been sorely tempted.

To check out whether we had lost our taste for being centrifuged, we headed for Lucy’s all time favourite rollercoaster, Air. This simulates flying around on your tummy wiggling your toes, and a right old sensation it is, too. It’s a classy ride, very smooth, and greatly improved if you get to float over Staffordshire without screams. Rolling gently over and upward into the sun like dead ants with your best beloved by your side brings you closer to heaven than a poke in the eye.










We took Anna for the first time on Rita Queen of Speed, a name that’s fun to ennunciate in thick Glaswegian. Rita accelerates you from 0-60 in 2 seconds. She offers a particularly orgasmatronic experience for us Brits, because her Queue to Thrill ratio is One hour to 18 seconds.

Finally, we all went on Nemesis, which is very iggly wiggly, like this:

You Barrel roll in and out of a few holes in the ground for 22 seconds, shooting 3-4G on the loop the loop bit. All most acceptable. I usually look like I'm nodding off in the pix, but on our Air ride, I look I’m casting eyes up to heaven, and Lucy looks insanely happy, like she’s got there already. Perhaps we have, after almost 26 years of marriage. The very nice lady at MacDonalds on the way home (I know, I know — first time in years) complimented Lucy on our childrens’ politeness (an unanticipated bonus). Proof that the family that plays together outlays together. Back to school next week. And planes overhead, perhaps.

South Africa: Rubber necks, stiff backs

We flew out of Cape Town at 22:40, 22 degrees, into a typical January London morning — 3 degrees, dense low cloud, people shuffling around trying to hold their colds at bay. Now back in the UK, and wallowing in seemingly unimited bandwidth, it seems the main problem about South Africa is also its greatest joy — it's a long way away.

It’s been a wonderful experience for us both, out of which it would be good this week to share a few photos and some larger questions South Africa raised for me. Today, hacking through a forest of emails and gunk, a few orientation pictures of the Cape Peninsular, including some animate and inainamte animals, that demonstrate how everything seems technicolor in clean air, especially in midsummer.

Rubbernecking the Rainbow Nation

About fifteen months ago, Lucy and I were bounced off a flight to Chicago by overbooking. But being jolly decent people, Virgin Atlantic offered us a deal. Go next day, and they offered us two tickets anywhere in the world, except Australia (They don’t own Australia, the lady said. Murdoch does? I wondered). If not our Oyster, the world was to be, for a week, perhaps, some other kind of rubbernecked bivalve mollusc.

2009 was our silver wedding anniversary year, and the kids put on a brilliant do for us at home. We could go somewhere together on our own, for the third time in 25 years.

We had two nights away from home for our tenth anniversary, with a working trip to India for Schools development in 2007.


So, with a world to choose from (except Australia), we chose Cape Town. Two of the most influential people in my young life (he said unpretentiously) had strong associations with Cape Town — the teacher who taught me how to read a poem, and my research supervisor at Oxford. We’d never been. Now we had nothing to lose but our children... for a week. Witha little help from our friends, Bob was our Uncle. Or Richard, perhaps. This week finds us rubbernecking, not writing postcards (too lazy) but with the opportunity to put an few pictures on the blog.

We begin almost overwhelmed by a beautiful country in midsummer, still very much under construction, but with everything to play for. There's a lot of beauty around us, and a vibrancy in the air.

The challenges are considerable, though, including the way it’s becoming a magnet, or lightning conductor, or something like that for all of Africa — its refugees, its resources, its challenges.

Surprises await around every corner. I’ve never seen a harbour as full of seals, not only rolling around just under the surface, but sitting only a few feet away from people, slobbing about. They also do a particularly nifty line in what looks like Synchronised Swimming, sticking their flippers in the air in a kind of mock-Jaws impersonation that probably cools them down, or warm them up, or something. It entertained us anyway...

Time passing, beloved

A rather marvellous week of silver wedding jollifications with family and friends. Lucy, like me, get a bit embarrassed about ballyhoo, but we did have fun marking a quietly amazing 25 years together. I meant to post earlier in the week this rather marvellous poem by Donald Davie. It first intrigued me as an English teaching assistant 35 years ago, and I always wondered whether I would ever be able to own such words from the inside.

God has been very good to us both, way beyond our deserving.

Time passing, beloved

Time passing,
and the memories of love
Coming back to me,
carissima, no more mockingly
Than ever before;
time passing, unslackening,
Unhastening, steadily; and no more
Bitterly, beloved, the memories of love
Coming into the shore.

How will it end? Time passing and our passages of love
As ever, beloved, blind
As ever before; time binding, unbinding
About us; and yet to remember
Never less chastening, nor the flame of love
Less like an amber.

What will become of us? Time
Passing, beloved, and we in a sealed
Assurance unassailed
By memory. How can it end,
This siege of a shore that no misgivings have steeled,
No doubts defend?

Looking back in joy, forward in hope

Normal service has been a bit slow over the past few days because of our silver wedding anniversary on Bastille Day. The kids mugged us on Saturday with a susprise party in the garden for a few old stagers, we had a day together yesterday. We are really grateful to family and friends who have sent good wishes and even presents. We much look forward, God willing, to an even more cosmic next 25 years. The possibilities are almost as exciting as the ones a French TV commercial implies you get with a certain well-known make of laptop:

MacBook New Feature from COREANOMAC on Vimeo.

Europe: worth a few straight bananas

Awaiting European election results, Lucy and I popped over for a look at the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker, now open to the public. For 20 years up to 1992 it was a regional government centre; a hidey hole from which a commissioner and 600 Civil Servants would have run a great chunk of Britain after the Bomb went off. Authentic Public Information films from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s play as you go round.

Stentorian government announcers explain how to protect and survive with bin liners, 35 milk bottles of water each, a sand tray and a central core or refuge under the kitchen table. They all assume one bomb somewhere with two weeks to recover, and we can only wonder at how we’d have died, the lot of us, if these devices had gone off in any number. They’re also rather coy about what you do when the fallout from your own nukes blows back across the channel and kills you anyway.
Yet for much of my lifetime that was the plan — hold the Russians on Lüneborg Heath for up to a fortnight, then go nuclear.


Some of us well remember the Cuban missile crisis — thinking war could happen, with some childish notion it would be a bit like the blitz. These films make it plain it would be like nothing of the sort.
A small amount of imagination makes it obvious this whole nuclear survival thing was and is a bunch of crap. Even with a backyard the size of Siberia (or Alaska) it's a complete hiding to nowhere.

When I was a nipper in 1962 a teacher told me there would probably be a third world war by 1970, as there had been one every 25 years of that century so far. That’s what she had experienced, anyway. The European Union may not have acheved straight bananas, but it has broken a sequnce of bloody European wars which ran for 300 years like sick clockwork, (1700+/ 1750+/ 1790+/ 1848/ 1870/ 1914/ 1939). NATO has provided a defence umbrella, but positively speaking, the EU has built a continent where a war between its historic nations is now, for the first time in 300 years, unthinkable. Its processees could doubtless be reformed in sensible ways, but the central achievement is that for the first time in 300 years, two generations, mine and my children’s, didn’t have to march off to a major war.

I’m less than impressed by anyone who is prepared to risk dismantling Europe, or reducing it to a mere trading arrangement.

The great failure of the League of Nations in the 1930’s was its inability to construct union at a deep enough level to prevent war between nation states in 1939.
It broke under stress precisely because it could develop no substantial common institutions.

To be a Little Englander you have to be too stupid, ignorant or unimaginative to understand the most basic fact of our contemporary history. In a world of globalised superpowers, Victorian nation states are ultimately roadkill; and if anyone were to let off a nuke the other side of the channel, we’d be killed by the fallout anyway within hours. Why wouldn’t we want to play a positive role in the mechanism for preventing that ever happening?

Toddler sees snow for first time

Thinking yesterday about childhood and innocence reminded me of an old family video Catherine made in 2001, showing our daughter Anna (then 2 yrs 4 months) seeing snow for the first time in her life. Having located it, I spent a merry time faffing about trying to port it to my laptop via a memory stick. When it wouldn't play, I suspected an obsolete format, and tried VLC and various other worthy applications recommended by fellow twitterers. In the end, in desperation, I manually set up an Ethernet network with an old hub from the loft, banged in a few RJ45s and ported it directly to my desktop. Result: Magic! Here, for the first time in 8 years, Anna’s first sight of snow from 2001.


(No blog entry yesterday because I was doing one for CBTI’s Sense Making Faith on Faith and Imagination)

Belated Valentine in the Snow

Saturday was almost the last day with enough snow in our back garden for play. Whilst our children were still abed, Lucy and I popped out the back for something of what I think UK tabloids used to call a Love Romp.

Valentine’s Day this year also brought a poem shared by poet Elspeth Murray (using Twitter) — short enough to write on a card, as she pointed out.

A Betrothal
E. J. Scovell

Put your hand on my heart, say that you love me as
The words upon the hills cleave to the hills’ contours

I will uphold you, trunk and shoot and flowering sheaf,
And I will hold you, roots and fruit and fallen leaf.

Chocolate heart from Hotel Chocolat in MK — highly recommended.
Heigh ho. That could well be it for another 18 years...
PS also a chance to play with the new iMovie, complete with cheesy effects.

...and just to see how the other half lives, for details of an expensove nightmare Valentine experience for poor Ben the Debt Monkey, click here.

Chiltern Hills Freak Early Snowfest

The first snowy October day in Great Missenden since 1935! Lucy and I were up at the crack of dawn to try and capture the weirdness of it all — autumn russets and deep brown, bright reds, some verdant green, and sparkling fresh snow.

All this, and half term, too. We arrived back home in to find a note from Catherine, Tim, Stewart, Nicholas, announcing they had gone off to goof about on sledges in the hills. The result seems to have been some vintage romping loonery, caught on Catherine’s phone:

The rats, sensibly, stayed snugly out of it. Some of us had to go to work — a good hour to get down to Eton College for an afternoon working through plans to invent the country’s first interfaith dialogue residential centre for young people; Worthwhile activity but fractionally less of a riot....