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By ChrisW, 18 April 2008 6:46 pm

OK guys here’s a puzzle for you. I have taken this from the advertising blurb of an organisation which I am here dignifying with three letters: XXX. What’s it about?

“The XXX vision will be achieved through XXX’s Mission statement:

• To provide a spirited visitor experience through a range of high quality facilities and activities in beautiful surroundings.
• To deliver this experience through exceptional service provided by a highly motivated and welcoming team.
• To exceed our guests [sic] expectations, provide them with inspired memories and to ensure that they leave us having refreshed their inner selves.”

To put you out of your misery it is not a church but a countryside residential complex in the countryside about an hour’s drive from here. The fourth mission statement objective does talk about enjoying the local environment. Here’s an image….

I have three observations to make. The first is that linguistically it is all pretty desperate; what on earth is a ‘spirited visitor experience’? What are ‘inspired memories’? What are ‘our inner selves?’ An entire herd of clichés seem to be running free and wild here. The impression you get is that the words are just piled up one upon another; their meaning is actually irrelevant. All they wanted was some phrases that sound good. I feel that something awesomely vital has been lost here: and that is the concept of words as sense. What we have here is nothing more than a mantra to be repeated until something – numbness? Enlightenment? Who knows what? dawns on us. The curse of Babel was that men lost their unity of language; is the curse now renewed so that language itself is lost? Maybe Armageddon is closer than I thought.

Secondly, it is fascinating to see how spiritual the language is. This is a countryside experience not a worship conference or religious retreat. There are several ways of looking at this but perhaps the most profitable is to say that religious experiences are now fair hunting ground for advertising men and women. In the theological void of contemporary British life, the language of the sacred is hijacked to try to make the mundane sacred. God is dead, but let’s try and make Nature/experience/the project divine.

The third point is how close the XXX mission statement is to what some churches say of themselves. We have come perilously close to aping the world here. I am preaching on Sunday morning on the third of the seven letters to the churches in Revelation that to Pergamon. The issue there was that there were a group of Christians who were going along to idol feasts and either literally (or metaphorically) engaging in adultery. Now when I do a sermon I tend to do a bit of a web trawl for other sermons on the same passage to see if I have missed anything. What is interesting here is that most preachers seem to major on the heady combination of illicit food and sex. Yet that does not seem to be the most pressing issue today; I am not aware that many western towns have a Balaam’s Bordello (with special discount rates for church members). I think we have missed the point: behind the sneaking away to idol feasts and worse, was the sorry but understandable desire to be just like everybody else. We need to resist this temptation in whatever form it comes to us: the church needs to be the Church. In terms of language, we need to set out what we are clearly and plainly and avoid this sort of touchy-feely inspirational verbiage. It is the height of irony that when the world starts adopting ‘spiritual’ language it is probably time for us to stop using it.

Have blessed, inspired and spirited week and may your inner selves be renewed. Err, whatever.

Comments (7)

By ChrisW, 7 March 2008 8:01 pm

As part of the blog tour I was asked to write a letter to accompany the book. So I did and what follows is the part of it which deals with who I am. You may find it of interest.

A sleepless student of mine started a Wikipedia article on me and I refer you to that for factual details. Theologically, I am in British terms, a conservative Baptist with Puritan sympathies. In terms of nationality, I see myself as Welsh; I am Welsh by name (family legend gives me a twelfth century ancestor, one de Walys “of Wales”) I was born – and born again – in Wales – and am now a Welsh resident. There are Welsh distinctives in writing and they are there in my books. We Welsh are a people who have a fondness for their land, fields and trees; we prefer villages and fields to towns and streets. We are marginal folk; a little people whose fate has long been determined by others. We are sceptical of empires and suspicious of kings; our sad monuments record the names of too many who left our villages to fight and never returned. When we lift our eyes up from these wet, stony soils our thoughts rarely turn to the practicalities of rule or wealth; instead we dream. We dream of the past, preferring epics that look back to when we were a mighty people and – more rarely – we dream of the future. Above all we dream of things beyond this world: for us – as for all Celts – the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is thin and often breaks. We are well aware of sin and evil and, sometimes, grace. We are emotional, given to laughter, tears and the impulsive gesture but have a weakness for nostalgia: we are a people happiest – if that is the word – with twilight rather than dawn. We have a love of tales of many words and a great liking for music although we are perhaps too fond of slow, mournful tunes but then we have much to mourn. Yet for all our frailties, we produce heroes and we endure. Such things you may find echoed in my books.

Have a good week

Chris

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By ChrisW, 22 February 2008 7:36 pm

Well the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour on The Shadow and Night is coming to an end and I seem to have had a vast number of reviews. First things first; I would like to thank all of you who read the book, particularly those of you who seem to have found it, as we Brits would say, ‘not my cup of tea’. Had I time I would individually answer some of these reviews, particularly those that have raised helpful or challenging points. But you can’t do everything.

I will try to compile some of what I consider to be the more insightful reviews and post them on my blog. Yes, there were some negative ones but the general tone was surprisingly positive. One or two people – apparently sane too – praised my books with adjectives that went beyond those I would personally have used. I loved being a ‘fabulous Welsh author’; the word fabulous of course has a double meaning: ‘excellent’ and ‘mythical’. Anyway I need to go over all these reviews and think about them. I actually find reading reviews difficult: bad ones nag me and good ones make me feel vaguely guilty of pride. But I am very grateful to all who have been involved; it’s been a very helpful exercise.

Let me make a few comments. Some people consider the books have been misclassified and one or two clearly felt disappointed that the books didn’t fit in their definition of ‘fantasy’. Well, I have secular colleagues who plainly felt that the books are fantasy simply by dint of their invoking a God who acts. Perhaps we had better call them ‘genre-breaking’ or ‘speculative fiction’. (I have discussed this more at length on my monthly speculative faith blog). A few others felt that the tagline, ‘a fantasy in the tradition of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien’ was misleading because (surprise, surprise) I don’t write as well as they did. I am surprised anybody thought that such a phrase was a claim to quality.

One of two people frankly found the books rather hard going. Fair enough. Are there any books that everybody likes? Well, to this day I agonise over as to whether I should have speeded things up in Book 1. Yet, on balance, I think I made the right decision. Tall buildings need deep foundations and what I was doing in the first hundred pages was laying the foundation for the remaining 1,600. One theme which recurs on almost every page of the books is that of innocent men and women grappling with the novelty of evil. I do not see how this could have been remotely effective had I not, perhaps clumsily, tried to draw something of the world of innocence first.

One slightly curious point was that I expected two objections, but failed to get either. The first was that, unless I am mistaken, no one was terribly upset that I had deviated from standard North American imminent pre-millennialism. I also don’t recollect anyone getting terribly upset that I seemed to be happy with an old age of the universe. I suspect they made allowances for me being a Brit. and therefore de facto theologically suspect. Incidentally, a number of people were clearly struck by the accompanying letter I wrote, which talked about what I felt it meant to be a Welsh author. At some point, I really ought to post this on my website.

And now I better get back to my college work! With every blessing.

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By ChrisW, 19 January 2008 9:38 am

A number of years ago I had a slightly unpleasant experience. We had just come back to Swansea from Lebanon and I was at a church meeting where one of the current evangelical gurus from London, a suave, smart-suited fellow with not a hair out of place, was holding forth on the subject of workplace evangelism. In the best tradition of not lecturing at people without a break he made us do some exercise on, I think, what our work colleagues liked. I stared at the blank sheet of paper for some time. The suited man strolled over and stared at me. “Are you finding it a bit too easy?” he asked. “No,” I said. “I’m unemployed.”

I was reminded of this salutary tale last night, when feeling like some dynastic Victorian father, I gazed over the table at not just my wife but Son I and wife, and Son 2 and fiancée, just arrived for the weekend through rain and wind, all discussing the Puritans. I felt blessed and want to share it but, mindful of my readership, feel uneasy. For there are those who are not so blessed.

I know I am not alone in being made uneasy by blessings. In our church, for example, we have taken a decision not to mark Mothering Sunday. We have too many failed marriages, single women and infertile couples. (If your church is different, please don’t tell me.) In a city where unemployment has never really gone away, we try, unlike the besuited speaker, not to assume that everyone has a job and a pension. In writing this blog to a largely unknown readership I must assume that not all out there are as blessed as I am. This raises a problem: what am I to do with my blessing? How am I to express my pleasure at friends, family, health, a measure of wealth (at least by the standards of most of the world) and yes, blog readers and fans? And all entirely undeserved.

In fact, I suspect that this last phrase is the key. It is a grace gift: it is all undeserved. (By the way isn’t it the unfortunate and probably inadvertent implication that blessing has been merited, one of the things that makes the prosperity gospel so unappealing?) So friends far and wide, I am blessed: I give thanks and I wish there was some way of sharing it around.

On various other matters, I apologise for the delay in writing the blog; it’s been a busy week. It’s that time of the month when I write a blog for Speculative Faith and I have had a lot of other things to do. And now, back to the family.

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By ChrisW, 11 January 2008 7:33 pm

Well, back to teaching this week. The way the UK system works is that there are now major exams at the end of the year 12 when the kids are aged 16 or 17. These are actually extremely significant exams as any university application largely depends on the results. So, my students have come back from Christmas and you can see it dawning on them that very weighty matters which will affect the rest of their lives are just a few months away. It concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Anyway I want to throw out two questions to you today. I have been asked about both and I have no answer to either.

The first was a serious inquiry as to whether or not I had ever considered turning the books into a graphic novel. Frankly, I used to be rather scathing about such things until we went to France, the land of culture, and noticed that in the bookshops they always have a big section of graphic novels which they call bandes dessinée. (As an aside it is worth noting that whereas on British holidays visiting bookshops is pretty much inevitable due to our weather, we have been weeks in France and never considered visiting a bookshop.) It turns out that the French (as with the Japanese but not the British) are big on these things. I actually know very little about them, but I am now much less cynical. At best, they clearly are a distinctive and attractive art form of their own. In fact, I am reminded as I write that we once had a graphic story book of the Bible, which was so impressive that we lent it to someone and have never had it back. Given that many of my students, some of whom are otherwise very bright, do not read traditional books it seems to me that these are an interesting genre. Anybody out there know anything more about them? Anybody write them? Draw them? Know anybody to contact?

The second question, which occurred on the Lamb among the Stars Facebook page was on how appropriately to celebrate the release of the Infinite Day in June. Incidentally, if you have not visited that page and joined the fan club please do. I take a small – and possibly pathetic – pleasure in the fact that the number of people who are subscribed to the fan club has now just edged up over 70. Anyway there was the suggestion that we might try to have a virtual launch party. It is complicated, because in some parts of the world the books will not yet have arrived or been released. And I really don’t want plot spoilers occurring. But it would be fun to come up with an idea to celebrate what is a small, but clearly global association of fans. Something new that would be good publicity might be a good idea. Anyway over to you again: any ideas?

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By ChrisW, 28 December 2007 7:40 pm

Well, I hope you all had a good Christmas. Ours was pretty uneventful. For the first time for 26 years we had just the two of us for Christmas Day lunch, and I’m almost afraid to confess that we thoroughly enjoyed the break. Mind you, I made up for it on Boxing Day, where I spent literally twelve hours at church, helping manage Swansea’s Chinese Christian Fellowship in their big Christmas celebration. It was very impressive: I think in the end, they had over 200 people there. Well done guys!

What else to report? My article on Pullman on the Speculative Faith website aroused the attention of a very earnest atheist who wrote a long response. Unfortunately, this sort of site is not ideally suited for this sort of thing and actually, I don’t think most of the readership are terribly interested in apologetics. Equally, as someone pointed out to me, I believe we haven’t really worked out a proper way of doing debates on the Internet. Certainly not on blogs. Anyway, this thing got more and more sprawling as every time I answered the point he would retaliate with a response of greater length. As I have a life to lead, I curtailed it rather hoping that someone else would weigh in. It was a pity actually as he came up with the usual rather feeble comments about Jesus at the end. You know the sort of thing: if anything in the Gospels is challenging and striking it’s borrowed from Judaism or made up by the early church. The problem with this sort of thing is that it fails to explain how the church got started in the first place, least of all on that pretty improbable claim that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead.

Anyway, we got the DVD of the film Children of Men and watched it last night. If you haven’t seen it it’s worth borrowing, although the language is pretty strong. I suppose you could describe it as the curious offspring of the high Anglican English novelist P. D. James and the Mexican ex-catholic Alfonso Cuarón, but actually it’s more a loose meditation by Cuarón on themes from James’s novel than an adaptation. It’s an compelling dystopic tale of a near future where childlessness prevails, although a very major (and added) theme in the film is immigration. There’s a lot of catholic imagery too. Perhaps the most impressive thing is the compelling look and feel of an England that has fallen very much to nasty pieces. The urban fighting scenes seemed to me to be excellently done; there was an authentic and visceral (in every sense of the word) feel of places like Civil War Beirut. The interesting thing is although the film ends on a positive note, it is very open ended. From the relevant Wikipedia article this seems to be deliberate. In other words, it is the sort of typical post-modern offering in which it is the viewer’s task to make sense of what is happening.

I would dearly like to know what P. D. James thought of it all. I think I shall have to insert a clause in my will that I do not allow my books to be creatively reinterpreted in this fashion. I’m afraid I am old-fashioned; I feel that in writing the text the way I did, I imposed my meaning on it at birth. I feel almost inclined to say ‘dear reader, if you want another version that tells another story, then go away and write a tale of your own’. I hope that doesn’t sound grumpy!

Happy New Year to one and all. And Alfonso Cuarón, don’t call me; I’ll call you.

Chris

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By ChrisW, 9 November 2007 7:58 pm

It’s a Friday evening after a busy week and a long day’s teaching and I’m getting my first cold of winter. Reader, I do not feel like writing a blog. Not at all. Yet, I’m going to do it. The reason is not simply out of a sense of duty to the probably very small number of people who actually read this regularly. The fact is, I have actually found it to be quite a blessing. Quite simply, it forces me at the end of a long week to write something vaguely sensible and vaguely coherent. It is the verbal equivalent of making yourself go to the gym. You do reap benefits. So for instance, this week I had to rewrite a statement a student had made about himself for university. His comment about the result was effectively unprintable in its gratitude for how I utterly rewritten his statement. So it is worthwhile.

Anyway what’s new? Well, I have been truly outed as a writer in a couple of my classes and the kids want to talk a lot about the books. The trouble is, you can never be quite sure whether they are genuinely interested or whether anything is preferable to geology, geography, or environmental science. I tend to answer one or two quick questions and then move back to where we were. I’m not paid to promote myself. However, I do sometimes wonder if my reluctance to be drawn on the books is taken as an indication that I am embarrassed about them. If I ever was, I am not now. I have had enough fan mail to realise that most people actually enjoy them to some degree and some people enjoy them a lot. And no one has publicly said they are garbage. (If you think that they are, please don’t ruin my otherwise perfect record and move along quickly to someone else’s website. Please!)

But there are still questions I find difficult. For instance making the right response to ‘I hear you write books!’ For one thing, there is the question of humility; if you shrug your shoulders, look embarrassed and make some comment like ‘we all have our secret vice’, they tend to assume that what you write is utter garbage and you are ashamed of it. When they ask ‘what sort of thing do you write?’ and you answer ‘Christian fiction’ that, of course, seems to confirm the matter. Christian seems to be taken as code for ‘so poorly written that no one except someone with a preoccupation with the faith would want to buy it’. As a result I’m afraid I often leave the reference to Christianity to some sort of supplementary follow up.

‘Do you make a lot of money out of it?’ is another question, which often (too often) produces the tart retort from me “Do you really think I would be teaching you, if I did?” You have to point out that well although the sales are reasonable what writers actually earn after all the deductions is not that wonderful. The trouble is they do the equation: 10,000 books or whatever times say eight pounds and come up with £80,000 and assume that you have pocketed the lot. Chance would be a fine thing, particularly these days, when most of my sales are in the green and sickly dollar. Then they say ‘what are the books about?’ There is no easy answer to that, or none that I have found. I’m tempted to reply ‘these are profound meditations on the problem of evil in the world’ but that may not be a vote winner with 16-year-olds. ‘What’s your best selling book?’ is actually quite easy and quite a good question, because I am able to say it’s The Life, a book about Jesus, and I have sold around 70,000 copies. 70,000 copies gets people interested. But as I said, I’m not paid to talk about myself or to do evangelism and actually there is the student-pupil relationship which you don’t really want to breach. But they do borrow the books from the library and some actually seem to enjoy them. Who knows, perhaps I am doing some good after all.

Cough, sneeze etc.

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By ChrisW, 21 September 2007 7:21 pm

A double apology. One, I promised to write more on committees (and I will) and two, this is largely a repeat of the monthly Speculative Faith blog which I wrote this week. I have my reasons for repeating it.

One of the greatest masterpieces of art is the St Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is an oratorio for soloists, two choirs and, for those days, a reasonably sized orchestra. It was written for what must have been a very long Good Friday church service in 1727. In length (well over two hours) and in musical style it broke new ground and is one of the towering peaks of music. It is also explicitly evangelical. Through the use of hymns and choruses listeners are deliberately drawn into the events surrounding our Lord’s trial and death. Bach clearly makes the point; it is we who crucified Christ. Even when your German is minimal (as mine is) it is still a moving experience. (Unfortunately there is only really one version in English, and that is rather old-fashioned.)

Now this summer the St Matthew was presented as an opera at the UK’s famous Glyndebourne Festival. In itself, an opera version is not a bad idea; the music is dramatic and you do wonder whether Bach did not dream of something far less static than an oratorio in which men and – just possibly – women stood up and sung. I should say here that I didn’t see the performance but followed the reviews with interest. What happened is that the director set the work in an unspecified modern community (Beslan?) that had been affected by the violent deaths of children, so that the entire work became about counselling the bereaved. Let me quote from the Guardian: “the Passion story is a project that they are led through by four therapists, who form the central quartet of soloists. Every so often, one of the participants gets spooked and makes a run for it; seeing how any genuine emotion from the chorus members is immediately damped down by the insufferably sincere therapists, you can’t blame them.” The Passion was thus interpreted as a prolonged meditation on grief, suffering and loss; presumably with the intention of making it ‘more relevant’. Readers will probably not be surprised to know that the audiences were not impressed: one headline simply read ‘Crime of Passion’. Even non-Christian reviewers sensed that this was not at all what Bach was about.

Now here, long-suffering readers, let us turn to fiction. You see, it seems to me that the unbelieving world has three possible strategies in dealing with Christian art. Firstly, it can be dismissed. So it is a genre that is ‘insignificant’ and ‘not worthy of comment’. The writing of gay and lesbian authors is worth critical comment but not that of Christians: their books go unreviewed. Secondly, it can be derided. We all know the words: ‘old-fashioned’, ‘conservative’, ‘puerile’, etc., etc. Now consider the problem faced by someone hostile to Christianity when they come across a piece of such surpassing excellence that it cannot be dismissed or derided. The St Matthew Passion (one of Richard Dawkins’ Desert Island discs, by the way; there’s hope for him yet) is such a work. Here a third strategy is opted for: distortion.

So despite everything the St Matthew Passion is presented as not being not fundamentally about Christ and the cross but about the universal experience of suffering and loss. And haven’t we seen this elsewhere? No matter how explicit we make our Christian statements, what is written is twisted into something far less spiritual and ultimately, far less significant. Of course, in an age of postmodernism, when the reader, not the writer, makes the decision on meaning, there is even a justification for this: ‘I do not really care what you meant to say; I am only interested in what it does for me.’

It seems to me that because of its use of images and the unusual, speculative fiction is very prone to this re-reading. Remember how Tolkien had to make it plain in the foreword to Lord of the Rings that the book wasn’t about European politics? The voices continue: that lion isn’t Jesus, it’s a universal symbol of hope. And so on.

So how we are to respond? One way is that somewhere, probably outside the books themselves, we need make it absolutely plain that our meaning is not negotiable. It perhaps needs to be written down somewhere for posterity that this writing is not about politics, sexual shenanigans or environmental issues, but about higher matters.

I have no idea whether my own Lamb among the Stars series (I am uneasy mentioning it in the same article as the St Matthew Passion!) will have any sort of long-term success. Equally, I have no idea whether future researchers will have access to what we now write on the Internet. But if, in the providence of God, both happen, let me say something to you who read this (and this is why I have repeated myself in two blogs). It is this. These books are only indirectly about the current political situation or anything else as ephemeral; they are ultimately about the very Christian matters of sin and redemption, hope and courage, judgement and eternity. At the end of the St Matthew Passion Bach appended three letters: S.D.G. Soli Deo Gloria. I have done the same. Readers, producers, directors: take note and please, spare me from your distortions.

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By ChrisW, 7 September 2007 6:45 pm

It’s been a busy week. I went back to college to find my geology class is incredibly over subscribed (and that’s before they realise I have a Facebook fan club). As a result, they are going to give me an extra group, but it’s really rather awkward to fit it in the timetable, particularly as it will mean that I have to get taken off teaching geography and be replaced by someone else.

And on the Infinite Day front I had my first contact with my new editor and the good news is that they don’t want much in the way of major changes. One of the most useful comments I received from my previous editor was to consider broadening out the scope of the books to bring in other viewpoints. It was however, also one of the most time-consuming as it meant a major rewrite and made for much a longer, if better final volume. Anyway, I hope this means the editing process will be reasonably straightforward.

Two items of news caught my attention this week and are worth commenting on. Two days ago, Apple announced their latest line-up of iPods. I was reminded in reviews of the slick and polished presentation when in June Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone. One commentator, who I’d take to be otherwise reasonably sane, said, as he saw it revealed, how he found himself weeping.
‘For heavens sake, man, it’s only a phone,’ I wanted to shout. It came as close as anything I have seen to actually saying this technology is now my god. As my present iPod is getting rather full I am attracted by the idea of one with twice the space and three times the battery life at two-thirds the price of my old one. But please God, may I never weep over a techno-toy announcement.

The second piece of news may have slipped you by. It was that certain types of Moray eel have been shown to have a second set of jaws to help them grasp food. What was interesting about this is that almost every coverage of the story has referred to the film ‘Alien’ and its eponymous (and anonymous) double-jawed creature. It is a measure of the triumph of a film that its imagery is used as currency to explain something. When I mentioned the news to a teaching friend who has a background in fish genetics, he was gobsmacked. ‘How have they managed to evolve that?’ he exclaimed in near indignation. ‘That’s your problem, not mine,’ I replied. As someone has said, the problem with Darwinism is not the survival of the fittest; it’s the arrival of the fittest.

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By ChrisW, 24 August 2007 4:55 pm

I hope this blog doesn’t sound too intellectual, but after last week’s mean swipe at the Irish weather, perhaps a little bit of seriousness won’t hurt.

On the way back from college today I was listening to the famous American minimalist composer John Adams talking about his work commemorating 9/11, called On the Transmigration of Souls. It’s an interesting piece (it won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in music), but it was evident in his comment on it that Adams was distancing himself from anything like a requiem. It was, he said, ‘a “memory space” where each listener can find a personal response to the events’. It struck me that by saying this he was actually admitting that he had very little to say. What he seemed to be expressing in the piece itself was something along the lines of: ‘This was awful but these things happen and we need to accept that fact.’

Further thought suggested that in Western civilisation a response to tragedy, whether natural or man-made, has gone through four phases.

Phase 1 was common during the Christian period. Here the response was simply, ‘Help me, O God, to understand and come to terms with this tragedy that you as an all-wise and all-loving heavenly Father have inflicted on me.’ This is firm faith.

Phase 2, which occurs later at the end of the Christian period has a very different note. ‘Why O God, are you doing this to me? What are the reasons for this action?’ (This response neglects the well known fact that God generally does not give justification for his actions.) Here faith has been replaced by questioning. This is faith mixed with doubt.

Phase 3, which I think dates from the start of the Enlightenment (around 1750), expresses a deeper question: ‘Is there anybody up there all or are these events simply random?’ This is scepticism.

Phase 4, which really comes in the latter part of the 20th century, takes the absence of God as much for granted as the first phase took his presence. The best we can hope for is a sad resignation to this tragedy that a blind and unthinking fate has inflicted on me. A non-musical illustration of this would be the epitaph on the poet W. B. Yeats’ gravestone at the church at Drumcliff, County Sligo, with its chilling lines ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman ride by’. It is this sort of attitude (long the standard viewpoint in the East) that Adams and others seem to hold. This is a sort of post-Christian faith: we have returned to acceptance, but it is now without God.

For Christian writers this poses a challenge: we agree with our contemporaries that death and suffering should be accepted; but for very different reasons. Their faith and our faith are two very different things. I know which I prefer.

These are difficult matters, but they are worth thinking about. As someone wise or good probably said ‘nothing in life so concentrates our minds as death’.