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By ChrisW, 28 August 2009 7:31 pm

I don’t expect that many of my readers will know of Preston. It is a small town on the very northern limits of the industrial north west of Britain. If it is known at all, I suspect its chief fame lies as being something of a landmark on the journey north on the motorway: after Preston the ghastly and almost continuous urban sprawl of Central England is left behind and the Lake District fells begin to beckon. It is a town that I have known from school days so I reckon I’ve been acquainted with it for a rather staggering 45 years. We were there last weekend (my parents live nearby) and walking through I was struck by the contrast between the Victorian buildings and those created during the last half century.

I should explain that Preston was an important textile town in the 19th century (its motto is ‘Proud Preston’) and like so many of our northern cities acquired a civic architecture appropriate to its status as a global leader in industry. I’m afraid I’ve had to borrow some photographs off the web but this is the Harris Library and there are a number of other civic buildings of similar scale and quality.

Although Preston survived the Second World War without any major damage from bombing it lost a very fine town hall due to fire in 1947. But much remains: even some of the smaller Victorian chapels display a striking solidity.

Now what struck me in my stroll was how all this contrasted with what had been created during the near half century that I have known Preston. In my time I have seen the arrival of shopping arcades, out-of-town centres, car parks, bypasses and the odd sports ground or two. But there is nothing built to last. Indeed, the massive but now rather shabby concrete bus station built in my youth is now about to be torn down and replaced. This is all rather striking given that the last half century has been a time of almost unparalleled prosperity. Yet as I looked around I found myself wondering where all the wealth had gone. What have we done with the money? Where are the civic improvements that you might expect?

I do not believe Preston’s experience is unique: quite simply we do not seem to build anything in the same way these days.  This of course raises the question ‘why?’ Why do we no longer build majestic buildings that we expect to last for at least a couple of centuries? Why are our buildings – with a few exceptions –temporary, ephemeral structures whose best claim to fame is cheapness and functionality? I suspect you would need to be both an architectural and a cultural historian to really pin down all the causes and I am neither.  But let me make some suggestions: I think there are several technical factors that have come together.

• There are technological changes. Steel, concrete and glass produce a very different building style. We go for lightness and space rather than solidity and weight.
• With the ever more rapid changes in technology there is no point in building for the future; we all know of old buildings where we cannot fit in insulation, double glazing, fibre-optic cable or even enough electrical power points. In a world where the future is imponderable, the answer is simple: don’t build for the future.
• City centres are not the permanent features that we thought they might be. In Britain the Second World War was very salutary in this respect. The conventional bombing of Coventry and Dresden demonstrated that large-scale urban destruction was possible; the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that total urban destruction was possible.
• With the rise of the motor car city centres began to lose their central importance. The peripheries became more important.

Yet there are also I think cultural and philosophical issues worthy of consideration. So for a start, we don’t do ‘civic’ architecture on this scale anymore because we don’t have their values.

• The elevation of market forces means that cheapness is all. One of the sad maxims of earthquake damage is that educational buildings generally collapse quickly. The reason is that they are thrown up quickly by councils whose agenda runs no deeper than providing a service for voters. There are no votes – only increased costs – in building for centuries.The western world has become dominated by an ideology which centres everything around the private individual as consumer. With such a worldview why take the time to build major and imposing buildings for the community?  Instead we create what is effectively consumerist architecture: and here a building is surely like the packaging around an item; effectively disposable.
• Yes, there has been a massive growth in wealth but it has been largely diverted back to private individuals and private wealth. We have consciously – or subconsciously – chosen cheap holidays and new cars over faster rail systems, expanded civic libraries and imposing town halls. You could almost say ‘If you want our monument look in our garages’.
• We simply do not build for the future. Much is made of popular evangelicalism’s preoccupation with an imminent end. I actually wonder whether that is not to some extent an echo of secular culture’s failure to believe in a lasting future.  “Let us eat, shop and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

The thing that is striking is that some of this short-term consumerist ethos has found their way into the church. In the Old Testament we see the Jewish people moving from the temporary tented Tabernacle to the solidly imposing Temple. In what we are and what we stand for we seem to prefer the alternative trend. There is something troublingly lightweight, flimsy and ephemeral about much of our worship and teaching and yes, our, buildings. In many ways I am troubled by the massive chapels of towns like Preston and of many Welsh urban areas. They are impractical and hard to maintain. Yet in their construction I see things that I find missing today: a confidence, a hope in the future, a desire to make a lasting statement about values. In a way that we do not, they had faith.

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By ChrisW, 21 August 2009 6:00 pm

There has been a certain bemusement in the UK recently over the sudden American preoccupation with the British National Health Service. I followed the debate with some interest: these are important issues. I also have some familiarity with the private system: when we were in Lebanon the system was totally private. The result was that at the entrance of the American University Hospital casualty department two sombre signs were posted . The first read something on the lines of ‘No guns allowed beyond this point!’; the second, ‘Medical Insurance Essential’. Immediately beyond the signs was an armed guard and a cashier’s office to ensure that both these entry criteria were met.

Anyway, I have to say that most Brits I know were pretty indignant about the NHS being trashed on US television by those opposed to Obama’s health care reform package. Passing over the ridiculous assertion that Professor Stephen Hawking would not have been kept alive by the British system, when that is exactly what it has done, our indignation was aroused on a couple of counts.

The first is that on the whole the British system works very well, and when it comes to accidents and emergencies, extremely well. We get the odd horror story but in general the system is really very good at what we call A and E. One of its big plus points is that when you do get ill or injured the only thing that matters is the medical process. If you hear someone in the UK say ‘I can’t afford to get ill’, 99 times out of 100 what they mean is ‘I can’t afford to take time off work’, ‘I’ve a wedding to attend’ or ‘It’s the big match coming up’. It is also very good for long-term care. As some of you know, our first grandson (now a thriving one-year-old) has a major hormonal deficiency that will require him to be on replacement steroids and to have regular health checks for the rest of his life. The total financial cost to him and his parents of this condition is zero. Well given that all three of them have enough to deal with anyway, there seems a degree of justice in the state shouldering some of the burden. I don’t mind my tax money going to that.

The second point of indignation centred on our perception of the existing US health system. Not having much experience of this, I do not wish to comment too much but it is a generally accepted truism that whenever you go to the States you make sure you have good health insurance. There is much that Americans may legitimately take pride in but I have never heard any American boast of their health system.

There is also much muttering in the UK over the perception (note, I choose my words carefully) that the protest against health care reform was being funded by the vested interests of the healthcare industries. Maybe I’m getting unusually cynical, but I too tend to take the old policeman’s rule that when faced with a crime, you ask ‘who benefits?’.

However the venerable NHS is not perfect. There are two problems, which relate to the general Christian theme of these blogs, to which I have no easy answer. The first one is that the NHS was created after the Second World War for a population that was still largely speaking, Christian. They felt that life was inevitably tough (the war and rationing had reminded them of that) and they had little expectation of making it much beyond the biblical 70 years. They had, if you like, limited expectations of a Health Service: it was not expected to reverse the Fall. (It should also be said that in those days there was not a lot the health service could do anyway; I have read somewhere that in the first years of the National Health Service, there were only 27 drugs available to doctors.) The problem now is that people expect to live to 90 or more, with all their organs working perfectly, their looks preserved and preferably sexually active, all at the state’s expense. (I hate to think of the number of drugs now available to the NHS, or their cost.)

My second concern, and I know it is shared by many people, is the extent to which we should bail out those who have effectively brought upon themselves self-inflicted injuries. I knew someone who courtesy of illegal steroid use during weight training destroyed his knees and put him and his family at the mercy of the state forever. A very large number of injuries received in our excellent accident and emergency wards over the weekend come about as a result of excessive alcohol abuse. And do I need to mention sexually transmitted diseases in unhealthy life styles? I do wonder if we had a private medical system, as we do with car insurance, such people would lose their ‘no claims bonus’ or its equivalent. But a totally free system is inevitably open to abuse.

Anyway I have no easy answers; the eternal Christian dilemma of balancing generosity and justice, fairness and forgiveness, persist. But I would cautiously suggest that, in both the UK and the US, we really need to do some careful and compassionate thinking about the way ahead.

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By ChrisW, 14 August 2009 7:17 pm

There’s a lot that I could blog on this week, from family matters to healthcare policies, but I want to continue the theme that was picked up last week: that of language. One of the fun things of struggling with another language (and I never do more than struggle) is that, like looking in a mirror, you see familiar things very differently.

Anyway, let’s begin with some grammar. For those of you that don’t know French, French verbs take a tu form for family, children and close friends and a much more respect-laden vous form for everybody else, particularly those who are above you socially. Vous is also used when you are addressing more than one person. Most tourists tend to use the vous form in France because it’s less likely to give offence. English residents and others living in France apparently go through nervous agonies knowing when to shift from the vous to tu form. (I’m told that there are similar patterns in German, Spanish and other European languages: it is called the T-V distinction and you can read all about it on Wikipedia.)

Now God doesn’t play a major part in French culture. Voltaire and others had good go at ejecting him around the time of the French Revolution and he never really seems to have made much of a comeback. You get the impression that, in popular French Catholicism, the ‘Blessed Virgin’ and the ‘Saints’ tend to occupy what we might call the spiritual ecological niche that Father, Son and Holy Spirit fills in Protestantism. Certainly all the evidence is that if God is at all considered in the French mindset he is as a very remote and distant character. So with that all in mind, it comes as something of a surprise when, reading a French Bible you see that God is addressed in the intimate tu form.

On and off this week I have been trying to find out through the Internet and a French teacher friend something of the origins of this peculiarity. What transpires is that the Protestants seem from fairly early days to have used tu to address God while the Catholics didn’t. This caused some animosity and heightened the religious divide between them. The Protestants were held to be overly familiar; they seem to have retaliated by saying that the Catholic use of vous could mean that they believed that God was not one. Given that Bible reading was not actually approved of in Catholicism until 45 years ago, the debate was probably quite academic. However at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) papal approval was given firstly, to reading the Bible and secondly, to using the informal manner of address. So things are changing: nevertheless, some French Catholics have never adjusted and still resolutely use the vous form of God. After all, the argument goes, isn’t it inconsistent to address the Virgin Mary as vous but to address her Boss (so to speak) as tu?

This leads back to the fact that we used to have a similar problem in English with thee, thou and thine. Thee took the place of the French tu and was used for close friends and social equals and inferiors. You/ye and yours were reserved for those of higher social status. (There is a very good Wikipedia article on it). Apparently it had largely fallen out of use by around 1650 in southern Britain so all those historical novels set in the Civil War with them thee-ing and thou-ing are probably incorrect. As an aside, it has persisted in North English dialect until the present. Growing up in Lancashire it was very common to often hear people addressed as thee: as in “I’ll get thee a cuppa’ tea” and “where has tha’ been?” Being totally lacking in linguistic skill (grammar of any sort was starting to die out in the 1960s) I only now realise that it was restricted to use between friends and in the singular form only. The curious irony is, of course, that many people assume that the use by the Authorised Version (KJV) Bible of thee and thou is to indicate a respectful distance between us and God. That was not the meaning: far from it.

In fact, the issues here are not entirely linguistic; it’s the old dilemma of familiarity and respect. Because neither Hebrew nor Greek uses this T-V distinction we don’t have a pattern to go from. In this respect English Bible translators have much less of a problem: they don’t have to choose. I suppose using the tu form in prayer is something one would learn. How suitable you would feel it was, would probably depend on how you felt you stood in respect to God. If you see God as your Heavenly Father then the family tu form would no doubt seem utterly sensible. But if you see him as Lord then I presume vous would seem more appropriate.

A final comment here. In the Lamb among The Stars the Assembly worlds speak the artificial Communal. In case anyone asks I have no real answer as to whether that language would have preserved the T-V distinction. The issues of familiarity and respect, of God being Father, Friend and Lord are, this side of glory, not easily resolved.

Have a good week

Chris

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By ChrisW, 7 August 2009 8:38 pm

One thing was very striking in France this year, the fact that almost everybody we met was able to communicate in some way in some form of English. Don’t misunderstand me, we used French with the French and for the most part got along very well, but every so often we needed some help and at this point they would take pity on us or overcome national pride and come up with a helpful statement in some form of English that would clarify matters. The Germans and Belgians also seem to have access to a similar, rudimentary but functional form of English. (What about the Dutch you say? In my experience the Dutch almost without exception speak English very well: sadly, the true Dutchman/Dutch woman often reveals their origin by speaking amore formal and more correct English than we lazy speakers ever would.)

This is the phenomenon that has been called Globish (pronounced globe-ish), a word which I will avoid because it seems to be a patented term with a particular philosophy behind it. ‘Global Basic English’ may be a better term. But whatever you call that there is no doubt that the phenomenon of English-Lite it is here and is increasingly widely used as a functional lingua franca across the world. It is able to deal brutally with tenses so that past, present and future simply become ‘I go to town yesterday’, ‘I go to town today’, ‘I go to town tomorrow’. Plurals are created simply by adding an S to anything. You identify the subject of a sentence by simply saying ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘they’. Sentences are kept short. Vocabulary is reduced; some people say to as little as 1,500 words. Adjectives can be put before or after the noun and are very limited: ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘cheap’, ‘expensive’, ‘many’, ‘few’. Word order is astonishingly flexible. Anything remotely clever or subtle like puns, humour, sarcasm, irony, nuances or ambiguous words is avoided.

On the whole I welcome this. Ever since Latin stopped being the language that every civilised gentleman and lady used we have been waiting for something like this. It’s not quite the end of the curse of Babel but it’s better than mutual incomprehension.

Some people however object to this on the grounds that it is the triumph of American and English culture over the rest of the world. I am not so sure: the whole point about Global Basic English or whatever we call it is that it does not replace the native language. It is hardly going to be the main language of any culture. It is not easy to be romantic in it for a start and it is hardly suitable as a language of politics: for that you need a language in which it is far easier to mislead people than in stark, plain GBE. One of the key proponents of Globish is French and he sees it as being the salvation of the French language; I can see his point.

Two observations. First, if the rise of Global Basic English is at all threatening, it is threatening to native speakers of English. On the one hand, it is we who are most inclined to be misunderstood by our use of complexities and nuances that others eschew. On the other, there will be a danger that High English will be corrupted by the presence of its debased English-lite offspring. One teacher grumbled to me this year that he felt some of his native English speakers were incapable of using past, present and future tenses correctly. And this was at A level! And of course the fact that you can universally be understood with a subset of your native language is not exactly going to encourage us to master French, German or Spanish, let alone the really difficult languages of East Asia.

The second observation, which does have a spiritual significance, is that in some respects we have been here before. Scholars point out that classical Greek which was venerated by every civilised man because of its flexibility and great literary tradition, gave rise to a vulgar offshoot, Koine Greek. Koine Greek (which eventually acquired a much greater subtlety than Global Basic English has at the moment) became the language of tradesmen and the marketplace anywhere where the Greeks had once ruled; which was pretty much most of the Mediterranean and well over as far as Mesopotamia. It seems to have coexisted with classical Greek.

The really interesting thing is that it in this Koine Greek that the New Testament is written and which appears to have been the language of much of the early church. That is something you need to remember when you hear people defend the Authorised Version (KJV) on the grounds of its beauty of language. Equally it is worth remembering when you come across preachers who deliberately aimed for a polished preaching style with a high use of English. (The Arabic church has suffered greatly from preachers who feel that they must communicate in high classical Arabic; Welsh speaking friends tell me that their church has also suffered at the hands of men who aspire to flowery literary elegance.) Those of us who are writers and who aim for a measure of literary competence and even that hard-to-define thing called style need to remember that a debased language seems to have been good enough for God. When it comes to preaching, it seems that style and elegance are added extras. In the beginning was the Word…

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By ChrisW, 31 July 2009 9:17 pm

I suppose if you read the last few blogs you had this vision of me writing them from a cool, damp Swansea. Well, I have to disillusion you. We have been on holiday and in fact I wrote the last three blogs together in the first week of July and had them remotely posted in our absence. I did however manage to check on my blogs reasonably regularly courtesy of my iPhone and a very dodgy and extremely expensive GPRS network. So I hope no one was terribly miffed when it took 48 hours for the answer to be posted.

You see the thing is you can hardly announce on the Internet that you’re going away on holiday for the next two weeks. All someone needs to know is where you live (and that probably isn’t too hard to find) and Mr or Mrs Badperson can break in and help themselves. Actually, you’d find it quite difficult with us as we have a very efficient burglar alarm and one or two neighbours who seem to know exactly what we are doing, even when we aren’t doing it.

We haven’t had a burglary for over ten years. What happened the only time we have been burgled is quite revealing about Swansea and doesn’t really reflect much credit on Swansea, its burglars or police. In addition to taking one or two valuable things, such as my wife’s engagement ring, the thieves helped themselves to a large part of my CD collection but apparently failed to notice that all the CDs were classical ones. I alerted the only two second-hand shops in Swansea that might conceivably take classical CDs (as you may have gathered, it’s not that sort of the town) and gave them my phone number in case some unlikely character decided to try and offload some improbable music. (You can imagine the dialogue. ‘Yeah well, I guess I’ve kinda got bored wiv late ‘em late Beethoven quartets. I know all the tunes.’ )

Rather to my surprise, a few days later, I did actually get a phone call: a couple of girls who obviously didn’t know Bach from Borodin had tried to sell a bag full at one shop and were heading to the next one. With the extraordinary glee that comes from the realisation that your own intelligence and righteousness is about to achieve a glorious victory over someone else’s stupidity and wickedness I called the police. They moved with uncommon swiftness and met the girls at the shop. Here however the achievement of the constabulary grinds to a miserable halt. The cops took the CDs off the girls on the grounds that they felt they might be stolen property, but let the girls themselves go because they couldn’t prove that they were stolen. (Me? I’d have asked them to whistle the opening bars of Beethoven Five but then I’m mean like that.) When, a day or so later, I went down to the police station I was asked to prove that the CDs were mine. At this point, I showed them that a number of them actually had my name and address on sticky labels on the back (I had lent them out to friends). Faced with this rather unwelcome but peculiarly compelling piece of evidence that they were genuinely stolen, the police then decided to search the girl’s accommodation. But by now the master burglar who had been running the show had moved on along with the loot. I was told that the girls were involved in drugs, that it wasn’t them that had done the burglary anyway and while I could press charges of them being accessories and receivers of stolen goods, the nasty man behind them would probably beat them up. So, I shrugged, committed it to divine justice, took my CDs and went home. The insurance kindly coughed up for all the other missing bits but they got their own back (they always do) by increasing premiums and insisting that we had a burglar alarm installed: which has on occasions been more trouble than it’s worth.

Anyway I digress. France was wonderful. We drove right the way down to the southeast corner, the Cote D’Azur, just above Nice. For the first week we stayed at the new centre A Rocha France have at Les Courmettes because I wanted to see how suitable it was for doing geology. We had intended to drive around the Mediterranean a way before coming back up the Massif Central but instead we found a nice warm freshwater lake with a good campsite and stayed put instead, enjoying sunshine, heat and good food. When we came back to Swansea it had been (guess what) raining pretty solidly for two weeks. As it is now. And probably will be tomorrow.

I consider myself pretty incorruptible. If someone offered me a life in the French countryside for a single night’s act of quality and competent burglary you’ll be pleased to know that I’d say no.
But slowly.

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By ChrisW, 24 July 2009 6:30 pm

I have been reading through the 10 Commandments and the social legislation that follows in Exodus 20 over the last few days and happened to glance at the notes in my NLT Study Bible. The writer made the very interesting point that although many of the legal elements have parallels in other documents of the ancient near East, the cause and effect linkage between faith and ethics found here seems to be unique. In other words although there were religious practices elsewhere and legal rules aplenty, it seems that very few people connected the two. Yet in Judaism to be a believer in Yahweh was to live out his religious code. To some people this may come as something of a blinding novelty: after all isn’t religion all about ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’? Well apparently it wasn’t common then.

The interesting thing is it is becoming increasingly uncommon now. We are seeing – increasingly I fear – a split between ethics and faith. In other words we are coming to a point where belief is totally separate from actions. So we have all sorts of people engaged in all sorts of unpleasantness and immorality (and please remember that immorality is not just to do with sex) who are quite happy to call themselves Christian.

I was reminded of a classic example of this in my recent reading up on the Napoleonic Wars where towards the end the Duke of Wellington plays a major part. A few years ago I read a very fine biography of the great soldier (and not so great politician) called ‘Wellington: The Iron Duke’ by
Richard Holmes. Here, as far as I remember, on one page Holmes details the Dukes voracious sexual appetite: it was of such an extent that one suspects his genes are now widely disseminated throughout Europe. Then a few pages later he discusses his religious beliefs with a degree of care and concludes that he was a generally orthodox run-of-the-mill Anglican. The really striking thing is that there is not a single sentence to suggest that the biographer saw any contradiction between Wellington’s faith and his actions. For Holmes, religion is in one compartment; behaviour in another. Interestingly enough this is surely sloppy history. Even if a late 20th century author sees no contradiction in a promiscuous and openly adulterous man having a Christian faith, then surely the Duke himself and his contemporaries would have been aware of the tension.

Of course you don’t have to look into biographies to see such sentiments. Many religious people parade their spirituality and do not feel obliged to justify or excuse the evident immorality of their actions; whether sexual, financial or behavioural. We can easily be tempted to go along with this current mood. For instance I quite often get annoyed with my students, laugh at rude jokes or say things that I later think ‘Doh! I really shouldn’t have said that.’ Yet I don’t think in four years of teaching I have ever had anyone say ‘Chris isn’t that inconsistent with your Christian beliefs?’ But they all want to know whether I believe in the Big Bang. Maybe I should point out my own inconsistencies?

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By ChrisW, 17 July 2009 6:30 pm

I don’t know how many of you picked up the following news item but it is a worthy subject of reflection. As reported on the BBC site, it was that Canadian psychologists have come to the conclusion that self-help mantras actually make you feel worse. “Those with low self-esteem actually felt worse after repeating positive statements about themselves. They said phrases such as ‘I am a lovable person’ only helped people with high self-esteem.”

Now of course this is just one piece of research and it should be surrounded by endless qualifications (see the NHS comments). Nevertheless I found it extremely interesting. This sort of thing is pretty widespread (see your local bookshop) and indeed sanctified-to-some-degree versions widely occur in modern Christianity.

The fact is I have always been suspicious of this form of self-help. Curiously enough it is not, I think, that it poses theological problems; it is rather that it flies in the face of science. It has always seemed to me to be the mental version of trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe that facts stay facts whatever we say about them. I suppose the extreme example here is the dismissal of the reality of illness by Christian Science (which, of course, famously is neither Christian nor science). Surely we have all had times when if we had tried to say to ourselves ‘I am a lovable person’, the honest response would have been ‘No, I am not!’

It’s a pity really. I honestly wish the world’s ills could be cured by simple mantras, regularly applied. I would cautiously suggest instead that the traditional Christian approach is better. Here two elements seem vital. The first is the honest (and, no doubt, painful) evaluation of the flawed beings that we really are and the second is the recognition that God, in Jesus Christ, loves us. (By the way, the latter is a vitally different thing from ‘finding us lovable’.) These two elements must be applied together or we get into trouble. God deliver us from ‘wretched sinner’ preaching unless it comes with the antidote of abundant grace. We must only make wounds where we also administer healing: and there cautiously. Such a two-pronged message has a double virtue: on the one hand it allows us to make an honest diagnosis of who we are and on the other it offers us a source of help that is outside of ourselves. Instead of sinking in a bog of internal self-denigration, we are able to stand on the rock of abundant external grace.

I wish indeed it was otherwise. But it isn’t. While psychologists may not agree with the Christian solution they seem ready to agree that the alternative doesn’t work.

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By ChrisW, 10 July 2009 6:30 pm

Last week I had the privilege (and I mean it) of being one of six staff taking 40 students from Gorseinon College to Oxford and Cambridge for their open days. It was something of a four-day epic and I’m still slightly recovering from it: you can never relax with even well-behaved students and temperatures hit 30o+.

For me the trip aroused ghosts. I don’t often talk about my past and any future biographer (dream on!) may well be delighted by the factual crumbs I here present. Due to some obscurity in our local education rules I went to secondary school at the age of 10 and was thus a year younger than almost everybody else. The school I went to (Hutton Grammar School) was well over an hour’s journey away and I used to leave the house at seven in the morning and get back after five. I did very badly in the first few years and managed to find myself on Headmaster’s Report for poor performance. In hindsight, I was simply exposed to too much, too early. It is symptomatic of what Hutton was that no one spotted the problem. (Mind you it did have two good biology teachers and an excellent geographer to whom I owe considerable and lasting debts. The RE teacher, by contrast, was a sadistic liberal brute whose violent temper was such that everybody was very scared of him.)

Anyway, by Sixth Form I had begun to master my problems and was showing academic promise. When my A level results came out they were extremely good but by then it was all too late and I ended up at Sheffield. I now realise that this had (with some minor exceptions in the staff) a truly lousy Geology Department. Indeed when, a number of years later, I came to lecture on Geology in Beirut I found there were some very fundamental elements of the subject that were a profound novelty to me. Here ends the history lesson.

Anyway you can imagine that, last week, I often found myself often wondering ‘What if?’. What if that warm August day in 1971 when I went in for my results, some discerning teacher had said ‘Hey why not come back for a third year and try for Oxford or Cambridge?’? One of the problems of being a fantasy writer – perhaps it is a just punishment for aspiring to write in such a genre – is that we can create our own alternative life scenarios all too easily. We ask, all too often, ‘what if?’ and imagine the alternatives.

Now that, dear friends, is one of my own ‘what-might-have-been’ or ‘road-not-taken’ moments. It is a somewhat peculiar (and intellectually snobbish) one but I suspect most of us have something similar. The job we could’ve taken; the guy or girl we should have asked out for a date; the tough decision we flunked. And so on….

I suspect there are a lot of things that could be said about this and I would be grateful for sane and spiritual comments. Let me list some observations of my own.

• We rarely, if ever, know that the road not taken would have been the better road. I might not have enjoyed Oxford or Cambridge or I might have become even more intellectually arrogant than I am… (apparently blog writing is a sign of intellectual arrogance) and so on.
• We cannot live our lives looking backwards: you can never drive a car successfully if you constantly peer in the rear-view mirror. The issues I have are not what I might have done in 1971 but what I will do in July 2009.
• Regret is a poisonous diet. It can sour all that we were, all that we are and all will be. A disappointment is unfortunate; but to have it wreck the rest of our lives is to turn a disappointment into a disaster.
• This sort of view (like greed, which it resembles) is insatiable: life could always have been better. After all I did go to university and eventually got a PhD! Isn’t that enough?
• A specifically Christian perspective is that we are told that this world is not all that there is. It is at best a brief preparation for eternity. Everything ultimately is to be judged in the light of eternity. That is what really counts.

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By ChrisW, 3 July 2009 9:44 pm

A friend of mine from the United States who reads this blog sent me this web address . It’s basically about the problems of the Anglican Church in the UK and how some churches are considering putting advertising placards on their steeples in order to pay for the incredibly expensive upkeep of their buildings. I sympathise. What is quite interesting in Wales is that although there are a vast number of disused chapels, most of the new churches (and there are a few) are avoiding them and using schools or old cinemas for worship. The upkeep of historically important buildings is difficult enough but it is even worse when you have to abide by well meant legislation for the preservation of ancient buildings which prohibits you doing common sense things like ripping out pews or removing the organ.

As I was thinking about this I was reminded of a book idea that I almost certainly will never write called Ten Bad Ideas in the History of Christianity. Let me list some of these and you can use your intellect to guess the where and when of them.

1. ‘ Say, I have this great idea, instead of meeting in homes, why don’t we make special buildings for our fellowship meetings? I do know, we could call them “churches”.’
2. ‘My Lord Emperor, have you considered making Christianity the state religion? That way religion would support the state and the state would support the religion. A great idea: can’t fail. ’
3. ‘Your Highness, we were wondering if as Pope, you have ever considered getting a lot of men together, giving them a few swords, blessing them and then having them sail over to the Holy Land and take it back from the infidel. You could call the whole thing well, a crusade.’
4. ‘Your Highness, we are sure that, as supreme Pontiff of the church, you find the widespread presence of heresy and dissent distressing. One novel suggestion we have for ensuring the smooth running of the ecclesiastical world is to have a special body of people authorised to establish good practice throughout Christendom, by force if necessary. You could call it The Inquisition.’
5. ‘Galileo? You need to sort him out: you don’t want these science people getting ahead of themselves. Make him recant.’
6. ‘Witches? Bad news all round. Hard to deal with. I know! We could try burning them.’
7. ‘Given that so many people don’t seem to want to believe in Christianity anymore perhaps we can try pushing the argument from design. After all you can’t reason your way out of that can you?’
8. ‘Ah Bishop. There’s some chap speaking in favour of this thing called Evolution down in Oxford. I don’t suppose you’d like to go and oppose him would you? Make it plain who holds the intellectual high ground. A bit of ridicule – a spot of humiliation – that sort of thing.  That ought to sort that lot out. ’
9. ‘ Archbishop, Number 10 here. The Prime Minister would be awfully grateful if you could call the present conflict a “holy war”. Wondered if you could point out how diabolic the enemy is and promise our boys that they are doing God’s will. You know the sort of thing.’
10. I can’t think of a tenth but I’m sure you can.

Well, have a good week, and try to spot the bad ideas before you carry them out, not afterwards.

Comments (6)

By ChrisW, 26 June 2009 6:45 pm

I am currently reading a book on the Napoleonic Wars called War of Wars by Robert Harvey. (No, I am not writing a book on the time; it’s just that it’s an appalling gap in my own knowledge I would like to remedy.) It’s an easy read although I was a bit alarmed to find from the Amazon reviews that there are a number of minor historical errors.

Anyway yesterday I came across mention of Charles Middleton, 1st Baron Barham (October 14, 1726 – June 17, 1813) a British naval officer and politician. ‘Who?’ you say, and frankly I don’t blame you: you’d have to be a specialist in the period to know him. The point is that Barham was head of the British Admiralty during the Napoleonic Wars, by which point he was in his late 70s. Essentially what we would call a ‘desk warrior’, Barham made sure that the ships and sailors were supplied with everything necessary to fight Napoleon. In an age of corruption, he was incorruptible and at a time of sloth, he was energetic. He was, by all accounts, the model of the perfect civil servant. It was his wise decisions and prudent planning that made sure that Nelson was able to resoundingly defeat the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. You will not be surprised to know that Barham was a very committed Evangelical and one of the early proponents of the abolition of the slave trade. In fact, it may even have been Barham who suggested to Wilberforce that he take up the antislavery cause. We Protestants do not have patron saints. If we did, Baron Barham would be an excellent one for civil servants and those whose lives involve sitting in offices, ticking off items on lists and balancing books. Perhaps there is a stained glass window of him somewhere.

Anyway as I was thinking of the good baron, news came in of Michael Jackson’s death. As one of the few people on the planet unable to hum a single bar of anything MJ ever sang I am reluctant to comment on his worth. I would cautiously suggest (there is a certain irony in my tone at this point) though that despite what many commentators have been saying, the loss to music is not quite on the same scale as if Beethoven had fallen off a cliff at the age of five. Nevertheless I found myself sticking up for the man a couple of occasions today when it was sneeringly suggested that he was a paedophile: the court found that he was not guilty. From what I understand (and I did once watch a documentary on him), Jacko seemed to be a tragic figure, a mixed up child whose development into a man was frozen by the glare of the spotlight. If ever we wanted evidence of the cost of fame, his all too short life surely provides it.

Anyway, I thought the two figures contrasted rather nicely. Barham, office bound, overlooked, labouring on dryly and steadily into an enormously profitable old age, and Jackson, the global celebrity, burnt out in the light of publicity at barely half Barham’s age. I know which I’d choose to be.