New Year Resolutions?

2012 — the year the world ends? I sincerely hope not; there’s work to be done, and I wish anyone reading this all good faith, hope and love in the coming year.

Among many cards and messages recently, a fair few friends have asked after this blog. After four heavy years, December has been my month off blogging, aided by three realities — an extended educational development trip to India, the need to do a bit more work elsewhere, and curiosity about taking a break. That and the Day job.

Any result? This is how things are shaping up, at the start of a new year of Grace...

• Over the autumn I have put more time into Facebook, as a more interactive space in which it has been possible to explore some in depth conversations.

• I've certainly decided that having a very open policy on responding to friend requests on FB is an excellent wheeze, and much of the goof-about stuff I had been using this blog for as a kind of commonplace book, is probably better done through FaceBook. Friend me, and I will friend you, er, friend.

• I have finally disconnected from Fleet Street. When the Times paywall came in, I subscribed, mainly because someone’s got to pay for journalism and it could have been a fruitful way to go. I've let the sub go now, mainly because it was adding little value to my life. The upside was occasional pieces of themost superb journalism — Simon Barnes, I will miss you, sir. The downside was a tedious sense of being trapped at a fundamentally narrow andsuperficial party, surrounded by low grade right wing bores, stories spun up in a hurry, often lifted from the internet or agencies anyway, a dreadfully sparse and low standard of scientific, historical, educational and religious reporting. By December I noticed I could only be bothered to download the Times once a fortnight, out of a sense of duty. Why? I wondered. So I stopped. Mr Murdoch, I sucked it and saw. Now I’m out of here.

• Twitter has been my space of choice for immediate news, keeping up with events and opinions, and reportage. 

• The odd meeting or event, anything with potential news value, has proved to be well worth tweeting, and I have been using Twitter to trawl reactions and opinions all over the place. 

• If I worked at a desktop rather than being out and about so much, I might use Twitter even more, but certainly it remains my best immediate reaction and comment source, to listen as much as to talk. I use Echofon to thread conversations on iPad and iPhone.

• What is best done on this blog, however, are short comment pieces with the opportunity for follow-up conversations. As to frequency, I had been writing a piece then seeing through conversations arising from it until they dried up then sticking another on.

And in the meanwhile I'm also experimenting with a far cleaner simpler design. Some have been telling me they find the old one took ages to load, and had even produced the odd malware warning. I'd love to know reactions, especially if anyone misses any of the elements I've eliminated in the interest of de-cluttering.

That seems to me the way to go. Twice a week? Let’s see...

Presuming to Criticise the Great Oz

Is he a very bad man, or just a good man who's been a very bad wizard? MP's added a session to their schedules to hail the morrow, as after travelling all the way from, er, Oz, Rupert Murdoch, who does not instinctively do humility, announced that Tuesday was the most “humble” day of his life. A new message is coming through loud and clear — “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” This and the truth of Corporal Jones‘ immortal observation “They don’t mind dishin’ it out, but they don’t like it up the rear.”

This is a critical turning point for everyone. For years we have all believed in a monolithic puissant Behemoth called “The Media.” The power that drove its steely flanks was terrible and swift, and derived from owning the means of production — Scott's old joke about a free press in England, as long as you happen to own a press. Now we all own a press, and carry it around in our pockets, and if we don’t like Mr Murdoch and his works he may not listen, but he can't prevent us expressing ourselves, or manipulate the stories we tell without us being able to do anything about it. His value came from a monopoly on the means of production, and that monopoly is busted.

The digital reformation that drives this change has been afoot for a long time. Ironically the Murdoch Bunker in Wapping is a concrete monument to its first wave, when, three decades ago, he rode into town on the tail of Eddie Shah and cleared out old Fleet Street of its quaint Spanish Practices. Now his empire is as obsolete as the older order it displaced. Mr Murdoch has even more humble days to come, no doubt.

As dramatic and iconic as the NI tale may be, don’t let's obsess on Mr Murdoch. For a start, as Rebekah Brooks hinted darkly on Tuesday, the word on the street was that other titles have behaved equally, if not more, unethically than the News of the World. Her attempt to suggest the Home of Dity Tricks was the Observer hardly stacked up, when everybody knows the Daily Mail has led the ruthless pack. The principle holds, however, that the scope of this deflation is far broader than just NI.

So what wll the news title of the future look like, and how will hacks make a living? I suggest, ont heir wit, like they always did. Human beings have an insatiable appetite for words and information — they just don't want it controlled by unaccountable Big Beasts. The market will segment into a variety of models, of which the Huffington Post and Financial Times seem to represent two. HP draws in writing talent from wherever and aggregates it, whilst the FT contains information that’s actually worth the money for its (specialised) audience.

What of the Murdoch staff? They have various dates down the station, whilst the politicians gyrate to dodge the bullets flying around this story. There is a global dimension, of course, given the 9/11 hacks if for no other reason. There is the question of compensation to 9,000 victims who may not feel as obliging and negotable as the first handful did when Rebekah Brooks paid them off, thinking, she says, they were the only ones.

As to the Dinosaur press, I have a Times sub, but if I'm honest must confess I seldom bother to download it any more. It's a reasonable production and I can look back to half a dozen articles this year I have much valued but frankly I find the whining editorial tone, the monochrome thinking and narrow selectivity of narratives the paper brings to every issue boring, lifeless and mediochre. I wade through a load of padding to get to a few nuggets of gold, when my browser would find me stuff I actually wanted to read in a fraction of the time, free to boot. So I keep the subscription going out of a blend of guilt and optimism, but my heart's not in it.

You may say that I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one. The future will be different, and I for one will not miss the former contents of the crumpled and deflated green robes over in the corner.

Leadership Secrets of Alastair Campbell

I have some trepidation about the cult of leadership, because the effectiveness of any outfit really does depend on the systemics and context as much as a single leader's gifts and commitment. However, continuing the discussion begun here yesterday, my eye was taken last week by some principles about leadership from an unlikely source — Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s great Spin Doctor in the Sky, whose diaries are now appearing in print.

These may well become the prime source for political historians of the Blair years in the way Alan Clark’s did for Thatcher. Some will like Mr Campbell more than others, indeed his partner says he’s been much nicer to live with since he finished work as a spin doctor, but he’s a perceptive information hound who observed world and goverment leaders closely for ten years. He pulls no punches. In a Times interview he concludes these are the qualities that make an effective leader in this day and age:

Clarity of objective and strategy. Only then go tactical.



The best team leaders are the best team players



Boldness



Adaptability



Staying calm in a crisis. Listen but lead, not listen and lead



Patience. Take your time if you have to.



Set the media agenda. Don’t let them set it for you.



Get your head above the parapet when the s***t’s flying



Encourage enterprise and ideas at all levels of your organisation in a non-blame culture.

Discuss?

Sir John Mortimer RIP

I was delighted to read the Times account of Sir John Mortimer’s funeral at Turville Church, Buckinghamshire. Among great tributes from his massed friends and admirers, the tip of a huge iceberg, I am glad to know the Vicar did a good job holding things together in Church, and capturing the spirit:

“Sir John called himself an atheist for Christ. He always came to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. But he emphatically did not believe in life after death.
My hope,” she added, “is that he has had a wonderful surprise.”

The C of E at its best, I thought. And the Atheism? It sounds as though God views atheism as a harmless eccentricity, which probably doesn’t really exist as much as people think, infinitely better than pretending to believe, which is a ruddy menace...

Peter Buckley: Loser as Winner

I ain’t no fight fan, but a Canadian friend who was once described boxing to me as “like chess at speed” and I can see why people follow the fight game. Yesterday I heard an item on the BBC whilst in the car, which refernced a slightly dotty item in yesterday’s Times: ‘World’s worst boxer throws in the towel on lucrative career as human punchbag:’

Peter Buckley, defeated 256 times, says that his next fight will be his last. He boxes so often that he sometimes turns up with a black eye before a bout. Boxing fans will gather in Birmingham on Friday night to witness the final fight of a man who should be remembered for ever as Britain’s most spectacular sporting loser...

Buckley has lost more fights than any other boxer in the world. Throughout his 256 defeats, he has remained magnificently undeterred. While the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC) remained desperately concerned that he would do himself a serious lasting injury, Buckley persisted, losing bout after bout.

In the past five years he has put together a particularly impressive losing streak, failing to win in 88 successive bouts. “I’ve had my eye on the 300 mark for a while, and it’s a little milestone I want to achieve, but I don’t want to fight on,” he said...

One site commenter, obviously knowledgeable in these matters, is very positive:

Peter is a defensive master. He even gave a defense masterclass on Sky Sports a couple of years ago. He simply does not get hit. He has fought so many future champions and yet has been stopped 10 times in 299 fights.

You have to say he stays alive somehow, and must be a very courageous gentleman, with lots of grit and pluck and all those other Boys Own virtues our Edwardian great grandfathers so admired, that rather died in the trenches.

We Brits celebrate the charge of the Light Brigade and Captain Scott’s Polar expedition; so here’s to you, Peter Buckley. It probably couldn’t be asked in the US in such a way as to make sense, but here‘s a question: Every game has winners and losers. Why is “loser” a term of playground abuse? Can you be such a good loser that you become, eventually, an iconic winner? Resilience, courage and stickability are surely admirable qualities. I’m reminded of Cool Runnings and the Jamaican Bobsleigh Team. I’d certainly buy this guy a drink any day, and the article does say that by losing he has been an essential part of many winners’ careers. At that point the whole daft thing begins to sound almost Christian...

Cardinal Newman’s Grave

There’s a veritable starburst of factual religious reporting going on in the Times, about the decomposition of Cardinal Newman’s body — many thanks to Ruth Gledhill and Libby Purves. Before Lord Northcliffe, Randolph Hearst, and “the yellow press,” newspaper reports were highly factual, like contemporary local coverage of village dog shows with all names — boring, perhaps, but a real record. As a research student, I found Victorian newspapers to be serious sources of fact as well as lurid opinion, very different from today’s press.

Julian Litten has done wonderful research on the English Funeral. The 1890’s marked the heyday of Victorian funerals, before the first world war cast the whole culture of the English funeral into a different, more modest, key. Middle class aspirations, reinforced perhaps by fear of premature burials had popularised embalming and show. Newman, like other personally devout believers, eschewed all this, reasserting the scriptural principle of “dust to dust.” The use of moss is well attested for funerals which involved transporting coffins by cart, as cushioning. It seems suitably pre-raphaelite — they lined the hearse with it for William Morris’ funeral in 1896.

I am not surprised to find Newman’s wishes for his own funeral reflect the images of Keble’s Christian Year. Moss, for Keble is the sign of verdant spring even in Autumn and thus the hope of resurrection. In one poem he describes the kind of place Tractarians would want to be seen dead:

Within some circling woodland wall,
Where bright leaves, reddening ere they fall,
Wave gaily o’er the waters brown.
And let some graceful arch be there
With wreathed mullions proud,
With burnished ivy for its screen,
and moss, that glows as fresh and green
As thought beneath an April cloud —

There is absolutely no significance in the use of the word “gaily” in line three, not even for Newman and Ambrose St John. Sorry, Peter...

Indaba — a luta continua!

Checking back on Ruth Gledhill’s Times blog, and faced with a provincial meeting, and a self-select Canon Law meeting which I'm looking forward to as a member of the Ecclesiastical Law Society, I think Ruth’s put her finger on the real challenge just now:

So it appears, you can take indaba out of Africa, but you can't take good old democratic infighting out of the West. It's business as usual at Lambeth, and one way or another, these 650 bishops are determined to have a vote and make it count.

For those facilitating groups, the struggle is how to free up the process to be all it could be. I notice in some groups there’s a bubbling up feeling we can make more of the process if we trust its inherent wisdom, rather than micromanaging it. As well as Ruth’s challenging and perceptive comment from the outside, I overheard something else at coffee time today, that made me think the change in gear among us that’s happening and needs to bear fruit.

Indaba means setting your own agenda, but taking real responsibility for it as well.

A principle that deserves serious notice and development?

Monstrous World! Dangerous Conceit!

Various people around here have been experiencing a weird disconnect between what the media are saying about this event and how it feels for those of us actually here. One member’s 90 year old mother, after reading inflammatory twaddle in her Canadian paper phoned specially to warn her son “Now don’t you go stirring up trouble!”

Nobody at breakfast this morning had seen the yeterday’s presser about Archbishop Den Bul and gays. The way we perceive him is in terms of the persecution of his church and Darfur, not gays. We do not have access to the pressers, but it seems to many of us that the correspondents are missing the point of this conference.

What of the words of the bishop in the Times video? We respect them deeply and look forward to hearing them along with everyone else’s in the context of indaba. The whole idea of indaba is to facilitate frank and honest speech like that. To make them the lead output of this event is leading to bizarre misrepresentation of the reality of it.

The press is sometimes making the news as much as reporting it, sometimes in the tradition of journalists who used to give out stones to Northern Ireland youths to provide pictures for the evening news. Shame on them. What is actually going on in here is generally delightful, global in scale, light of touch, with a lot of laughter, prayer and joy in one another. Journalists are naturally drawn to the extremes to make a story, but there is far more energy around the great unacknowledged centre.

Dwindling Churchgoers Death Plunge

Excellent summary by Thinking Anglicans and analysis by David Keen, here and here, of this week's press puffdoodle about church attendance. A basically serious Christian Research Report has, apparently, been hacked around and hammed up, with an hysterical sauce added about, guess what, Muslims. What a surprise.

All I can add is this yellowing cutting from the Times of 29 July 1971. It solemnly announces, as a matter of mathematical certainty, that as Britain secularises all churchgoing in the UK “will have disappeared completely” by... er... 2011. So, according to the Times of 29 July 1971, in two and half years time there won't be anything left at all. What are you waiting for? Pull your finger out! Get your skates on! Haven’t you got homes to go to?

Gentle Reader, this all goes to show... the fun of statistics. I note that the paid circulation of the Daily Telegraph in 1971 was 1,454,581. In 2005, allowing for giveaways, it was 605,555. At that rate, the Diocese of Oxford Reporter, with its stable circulation of 65,000 will overtake the Daily Telegraph, as a matter of mathematical certainty, by 2035. What a bunch of crap!

It also goes to show how elusive and subtle the phenomena of religious participation are. Despite the efforts of Christian Research and others it could be we simply don't have the reach and depth of figures that would shed light on the detailed position. There’s a really thoughtful reflective trail on the real situation and its implications on Richard Hall’s excellent blog, and, from a Conservative Evangelical perspective, John Richardson’s. See also the Interesting discussion of hammed up news by Simon Barrow here.